CSS selectors are patterns used for selecting elements and are often used to define the elements that styles should be applied to. They can also be used with lxml to select nodes in the DOM. CSS selectors are commonly used as they are more compact than XPath and generally can be more reusable in code. Examples of common selectors which may be used are as follows:
| What you are looking for | Example |
| All tags | * |
| A specific tag (that is, tr) | .planet |
| A class name (that is, "planet") | tr.planet |
| A tag with an ID "planet3" | tr#planet3 |
| A child tr of a table | table tr |
| A descendant tr of a table | table tr |
| A tag with an attribute (that is, tr with id="planet4") | a[id=Mars] |