CSS selectors, JSONPath and jq as alternatives

XPath is not always the right tool: CSS is faster and simpler for downward-only selection, and JSON needs an entirely different query language.

CSS versus XPath

from lxml import html

doc = html.fromstring("<ul><li class='on'>a</li><li>b</li></ul>")

print(doc.xpath("//li[@class='on']/text()"))        # XPath
print(doc.cssselect("li.on")[0].text)               # same result, shorter

# The one thing CSS cannot do here
print(doc.xpath("//li[.='b']/preceding-sibling::li/text()"))   # ['a']

• Reach for CSS first: it is shorter, faster and most front-end developers can maintain it.
• Switch to XPath when you need text matching, upward traversal or aggregation.
• In test frameworks, Playwright and Selenium accept both, so the deciding factor is usually readability.

JSONPath and jq

# JSONPath: the XPath-like syntax for JSON (RFC 9535)
#   $        root
#   .a.b     child access
#   [*]      every element of an array
#   ..x      recursive descent
#   [?(@.p > 1)]  filter expression

# jq: a pipeline language, and the better default on the command line
curl -s https://api.example.com/books | jq '.items[] | select(.price > 20) | {id, title}'

# Recursive descent, the jq equivalent of //
jq '.. | objects | select(has("isbn")) | .isbn' books.json

# Aggregation, which XPath 1.0 cannot do at all
jq '[.items[].price] | {count: length, total: add, max: max}' books.json

# group and reshape
jq '[.items[] | {lang: .lang, title}] | group_by(.lang)
    | map({lang: .[0].lang, n: length})' books.json

import json
from jsonpath_ng.ext import parse

data = json.load(open("books.json"))
expr = parse("$.items[?(@.price > 20)].title")
print([m.value for m in expr.find(data)])

FAQ

Related

XPath in the browser: document.evaluate XPath performance: cost, indexes and //

Last refreshed 2026-09-18.