The ability to use CSS/jQuery selectors is really nice, though; In order to find all <td>s whose parents have a class "blah", you have to use list comprehension

The ability to use CSS/jQuery selectors is really nice, though; In order to find all <td>s whose parents have a class "blah", you have to use list comprehension: tds = [td for td in soup.findAll('td') if td.parent.get('class') == 'blah'] In jQuery, this is more compactly written: tds = $('.blah > td') And if you just want to look for <td>s somewhere within a .blah element, you can use tds = $('.blah td') This is a lot less clear in BeautifulSoup: tds = [td for td in soup.findAll('td') if td.findParents(attrs={'class': 'blah'})] (If there are better ways to write this BeautifulSoup code, please let me know) Selectors have some other benefits too - you can just go to the CSS file and grab the selector that matches what you want, and you can be reasonably sure it'll work in most cases.