jquery-like HTML parsing in Python?

Question

Is there any Python library that allows me to parse an HTML document similar to what jQuery does?

i.e. I'd like to be able to use CSS selector syntax to grab an arbitrary set of nodes from the document, read their content/attributes, etc.

The only Python HTML parsing lib I've used before was BeautifulSoup, and even though it's fine I keep thinking it would be faster to do my parsing if I had jQuery syntax available. :D

Answer 1

lxml supports CSS selectors.

Answer 2

If you are fluent with BeautifulSoup, you could just add soupselect to your libs.
Soupselect is a CSS selector extension for BeautifulSoup.

Usage:

>>> from BeautifulSoup import BeautifulSoup as Soup
>>> from soupselect import select
>>> import urllib
>>> soup = Soup(urllib.urlopen('http://slashdot.org/'))
>>> select(soup, 'div.title h3')
[<h3><span><a href='//science.slashdot.org/'>Science</a>:</span></h3>,
 <h3><a href='//slashdot.org/articles/07/02/28/0120220.shtml'>Star Trek</h3>,
..]