Or you could use lxml in Python, which allows you to mix XPath and CSS Selectors. E.g.: from lxml import html doc = html.fromstring('<html><body><p class=

Or you could use lxml in Python, which allows you to mix XPath and CSS Selectors. E.g.: from lxml import html doc = html.fromstring('<html><body><p class="text"></p></body></html>') doc.xpath('//p[@class = "text"]') == doc.cssselect('p.text') # or doc = html.fromstring('<html><body><p>1</p><p>2</p><p>3</p></body></html>') doc.xpath('//p[2]')[0] == doc.cssselect('p')[1] # Note: My only annoyance is that .xpath() always returns a list, even # when you know that it will return only a single item.