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cssselect

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1.4.0 (29 Jan 2026) Apr 14 2012 21.7 million (month)

cssselect is a BSD-licensed Python library to parse CSS3 selectors and translate them to XPath 1.0 expressions.

XPath 1.0 expressions can be used in lxml or another XPath engine to find the matching elements in an XML or HTML document.

cssselect is used by other popular Python packages like parsel and scrapy but can also be used on it's own to generate valid XPath 1.0 expressions for parsing HTML and XML documents in other tools.

Note that because XPath selectors are more powerful than CSS selectors this translation is only possible one way. Converting XPath to CSS selectors is impractical and not supported by cssselect.

Example Use


```python from cssselect import GenericTranslator, SelectorError

translator = GenericTranslator() try: expression = translator.css_to_xpath('div.content') print(expression) 'descendant-or-self::div[@class and contains(concat(' ', normalize-space(@class), ' '), ' content ')]' except SelectorError as e: print(f'Invalid selector {e}') ```

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