---
title: "CSS Selectors"
original_url: "https://tds.s-anand.net/#/css-selectors?id=css-selectors"
downloaded_at: "2025-06-08T23:24:42.527184"
---

[CSS Selectors](#/css-selectors?id=css-selectors)
-------------------------------------------------

CSS selectors are patterns used to select and style HTML elements on a web page. They are fundamental to web development and data scraping, allowing you to precisely target elements for styling or extraction.

For data scientists, understanding CSS selectors is crucial when:

* Web scraping with tools like Beautiful Soup or Scrapy
* Selecting elements for browser automation with Selenium
* Styling data visualizations and web applications
* Debugging website issues using browser DevTools

Watch this comprehensive introduction to CSS selectors (20 min):

[![Learn Every CSS Selector In 20 Minutes (20 min)](https://i.ytimg.com/vi_webp/l1mER1bV0N0/sddefault.webp)](https://youtu.be/l1mER1bV0N0)

The Mozilla Developer Network (MDN) provides detailed documentation on the three main types of selectors:

* [Basic CSS selectors](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Learn_web_development/Core/Styling_basics/Basic_selectors): Learn about element (`div`), class (`.container`), ID (`#header`), and universal (`*`) selectors
* [Attribute selectors](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Learn_web_development/Core/Styling_basics/Attribute_selectors): Target elements based on their attributes or attribute values (`[type="text"]`)
* [Combinators](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Learn_web_development/Core/Styling_basics/Combinators): Use relationships between elements (`div > p`, `div + p`, `div ~ p`)

Practice your CSS selector skills with this interactive tool:

* [CSS Diner](https://flukeout.github.io/): A fun game that teaches CSS selectors through increasingly challenging levels

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JSON](#/json)