cssselect2: CSS selectors for Python ElementTree

cssselect2 is a straightforward implementation of CSS3 Selectors for markup documents (HTML, XML, etc.) that can be read by ElementTree-like parsers (including cElementTree, lxml, html5lib, etc.)

Unlike cssselect, it does not translate selectors to XPath and therefore does not have all the correctness corner cases that are hard or impossible to fix in cssselect.

Quick facts:

Installation

Installing cssselect2 with pip should Just Work:

pip install cssselect2

This will also automatically install cssselect2’s only dependency, tinycss2. cssselect2 and tinycss2 both only contain Python code and should work on any Python implementation, although they’re only tested on CPython.

Basic Example

Here is a classical cssselect2 workflow:

  • parse a CSS stylesheet using tinycss2,

  • store the CSS rules in a Matcher() object,

  • parse an HTML document using an ElementTree-like parser,

  • wrap the HTML tree in a ElementWrapper() object,

  • find the CSS rules matching each HTML tag, using the matcher and the wrapper.

from xml.etree import ElementTree

import cssselect2
import tinycss2


# Parse CSS and add rules to the matcher

matcher = cssselect2.Matcher()

rules = tinycss2.parse_stylesheet('''
  body { font-size: 2em }
  body p { background: red }
  p { color: blue }
''', skip_whitespace=True)

for rule in rules:
    selectors = cssselect2.compile_selector_list(rule.prelude)
    selector_string = tinycss2.serialize(rule.prelude)
    content_string = tinycss2.serialize(rule.content)
    payload = (selector_string, content_string)
    for selector in selectors:
        matcher.add_selector(selector, payload)


# Parse HTML and find CSS rules applying to each tag

html_tree = ElementTree.fromstring('''
  <html>
    <body>
      <p>Test</p>
    </body>
  </html>
''')
wrapper = cssselect2.ElementWrapper.from_html_root(html_tree)
for element in wrapper.iter_subtree():
    tag = element.etree_element.tag.split('}')[-1]
    print('Found tag "{}" in HTML'.format(tag))

    matches = matcher.match(element)
    if matches:
        for match in matches:
            specificity, order, pseudo, payload = match
            selector_string, content_string = payload
            print('Matching selector "{}" ({})'.format(
                selector_string, content_string))
    else:
        print('No rule matching this tag')
    print()
class cssselect2.Matcher

A CSS selectors storage that can match against HTML elements.

add_selector(selector, payload)

Add a selector and its payload to the matcher.

Parameters
  • selector – A CompiledSelector object.

  • payload – Some data associated to the selector, such as declarations parsed from the content of a style rule. It can be any Python object, and will be returned as-is by match().

match(element)

Match selectors against the given element.

Parameters

element – An ElementWrapper.

Returns

A list of the payload objects associated to selectors that match element, in order of lowest to highest specificity and in order of addition with add_selector() among selectors of equal specificity.

cssselect2.compile_selector_list(input, namespaces=None)

Compile a (comma-separated) list of selectors.

Parameters
  • input – A string, or an iterable of tinycss2 component values such as the predule of a style rule.

  • namespaces – A optional dictionary of all namespace prefix declarations in scope for this selector. Keys are namespace prefixes as strings, or None for the default namespace. Values are namespace URLs as strings. If omitted, assume that no prefix is declared.

Returns

A list of opaque CompiledSelector objects.

class cssselect2.ElementWrapper(etree_element, parent, index, previous, in_html_document, content_language=None)

A wrapper for an ElementTree Element for Selector matching.

This class should not be instanciated directly. from_xml_root() or from_html_root() should be used for the root element of a document, and other elements should be accessed (and wrappers generated) using methods such as iter_children() and iter_subtree().

ElementWrapper objects compare equal if their underlying Element do.

classes

The classes of this element, as a set of strings.

etree_children

This element’s children, as a list of ElementTree Element.

Other ElementTree nodes such as comments and processing instructions are not included.

etree_element

The underlying ElementTree Element

etree_siblings

The parent’s children as a list of ElementTree Elements. For the root (which has no parent)

classmethod from_html_root(root, content_language=None)

Same as from_xml_root(), but for documents parsed with an HTML parser like html5lib, which should be the case of documents with the text/html MIME type.

Compared to from_xml_root(), this makes element attribute names in Selectors case-insensitive.

classmethod from_xml_root(root, content_language=None)

Wrap for selector matching the root of an XML or XHTML document.

Parameters

root – An ElementTree Element for the root element of a document. If the given element is not the root, selector matching will behave is if it were. In other words, selectors will be scope-contained to the subtree rooted at that element.

Returns

A new ElementWrapper

id

The ID of this element, as a string.

index

The position within the parent’s children, counting from 0. e.etree_siblings[e.index] is always e.etree_element.

iter_ancestors()

Return an iterator of existing ElementWrapper objects for this element’s ancestors, in reversed tree order (from parent to the root)

The element itself is not included, this is an empty sequence for the root element.

iter_children()

Return an iterator of newly-created ElementWrapper objects for this element’s child elements, in tree order.

iter_previous_siblings()

Return an iterator of existing ElementWrapper objects for this element’s previous siblings, in reversed tree order.

The element itself is not included, this is an empty sequence for a first child or the root element.

iter_subtree()

Return an iterator of newly-created ElementWrapper objects for the entire subtree rooted at this element, in tree order.

Unlike in other methods, the element itself is included.

This loops over an entire document:

for element in ElementWrapper.from_root(root_etree).iter_subtree():
    ...
lang

The language of this element, as a string.

local_name

The local name of this element, as a string.

matches(*selectors)

Return wether this elememt matches any of the given selectors.

Parameters

selectors – Each given selector is either a CompiledSelector, or an argument to compile_selector_list().

namespace_url

The namespace URL of this element, as a string.

parent

The parent ElementWrapper, or None for the root element.

previous

The previous sibling ElementWrapper, or None for the root element.

query(*selectors)

Return the first element (in tree order) that matches any of the given selectors.

Parameters

selectors – Each given selector is either a CompiledSelector, or an argument to compile_selector_list().

Returns

A newly-created ElementWrapper object, or None if there is no match.

query_all(*selectors)

Return elements, in tree order, that match any of the given selectors.

Selectors are scope-filtered to the subtree rooted at this element.

Parameters

selectors – Each given selector is either a CompiledSelector, or an argument to compile_selector_list().

Returns

An iterator of newly-created ElementWrapper objects.

class cssselect2.SelectorError

A specialized ValueError for invalid selectors.

cssselect2 changelog

Version 0.3.0

Released on 2020-03-16.

  • Drop Python2 support

  • Improve packaging and testing

Version 0.2.2

Released on 2019-09-06.

  • Optimize lang attribute selectors.

Version 0.2.1

Released on 2017-10-02.

  • Fix documentation.

Version 0.2.0

Released on 2017-08-16.

  • Fix some selectors for HTML documents with no namespace.

  • Don’t crash when the attribute comparator is unknown.

  • Don’t crash when there are empty attribute classes.

  • Follow semantic versioning.

Version 0.1

Released on 2017-07-07.

  • Initial release.