CSS selectors

Great for:

• BeautifulSoup (selectselect, select_oneselect_one)
• Playwright
• browser devtools

Examples:

• .price.price
• div.card adiv.card a
• #main h2.title#main h2.title

XPath

Great for:

• lxml
• Selenium (via XPath)
• complex DOM relationships

Examples:

• //div[@class='card']//a//div[@class='card']//a
• //table//tr[1]/td[2]//table//tr[1]/td[2]

Quick comparison

• CSS is usually simpler
• XPath is more powerful for “go to parent/sibling” cases