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Overview

This project is a Scala implementation of the W3C Selectors Level 3 specification. I've already created one such implementation in Java, but Scala is my language of choice on the JVM nowadays.

Motivation

There's some built in support for XPath like expressions in the Scala library, but they are quite rudimentary. I also wanted to dig deeper into the parser combinators and this project seemed like a good way to do that.

Implementation details

The default implementation works with the XML classes provided by the standard Scala library, but the parser and its support classes may be used independent of the actual XML implementation.

Pseudo elements are parsed but not used when selecting nodes. It doesn't make much sense to look for a::hover etc outside of a web browser.

See example usage below for more info.

Supported selectors

  • * any element
  • E an element of type E
  • E[foo] an E element with a "foo" attribute
  • E[foo="bar"] an E element whose "foo" attribute value is exactly equal to "bar"
  • E[foo~="bar"] an E element whose "foo" attribute value is a list of whitespace-separated values, one of which is exactly equal to "bar"
  • E[foo^="bar"] an E element whose "foo" attribute value begins exactly with the string "bar"
  • E[foo$="bar"] an E element whose "foo" attribute value ends exactly with the string "bar"
  • E[foo*="bar"] an E element whose "foo" attribute value contains the substring "bar"
  • E[foo|="en"] an E element whose "foo" attribute has a hyphen-separated list of values beginning (from the left) with "en"
  • E:root an E element, root of the document or the root element specified
  • E:nth-child(n) an E element, the n-th child of its parent
  • E:nth-last-child(n) an E element, the n-th child of its parent, counting from the last one
  • E:nth-of-type(n) an E element, the n-th sibling of its type
  • E:nth-last-of-type(n) an E element, the n-th sibling of its type, counting from the last one
  • E:first-child an E element, first child of its parent
  • E:last-child an E element, last child of its parent
  • E:first-of-type an E element, first sibling of its type
  • E:last-of-type an E element, last sibling of its type
  • E:only-child an E element, only child of its parent
  • E:only-of-type an E element, only sibling of its type
  • E:empty an E element that has no children (including text nodes)
  • E#myid an E element with ID equal to "myid".
  • E:not(s) an E element that does not match simple selector s
  • E F an F element descendant of an E element
  • E > F an F element child of an E element
  • E + F an F element immediately preceded by an E element
  • E ~ F an F element preceded by an E element

Example usage (for the default implementation)

Suppose you have a scala.xml.Elem in a variable named elem that you'd like to query using CSS selectors:

val result = Selectors.query("div:nth-child(2n)", elem)

This will return an Either[String, List[Node]] where Left indicates a parser error. I.e. if the specified selector string couldn't be parsed correctly.

It's also possible to query using a pre-parsed selector string. This is the best choice if querying more than once for the same selector string since it only needs to be parsed once.

val selectorGroups = SelectorParser.parse("div:nth-child(2n)") match {
  case SelectorParser.Success(selectorGroups) => selectorGroups
  case SelectorParser.Failure(msg) => error("Parse error: " + msg)
}

val nodes = Selectors.query(selectorGroups, elem)

By importing Selectors._ you can also query like this:

elem $ "div > div"
elem $ selectorGroups
elem.cssQuery("div > div")
elem.cssQuery(selectorGroups)

Both $ and cssQuery returns a List[Node]. If the selector string specified causes a parser error an exception will be thrown. I think this makes much more sense when the actual element is in focus.

Build instructions

This project uses SBT as its build tool.

Releases are synced to Maven central via Sonatype.

"se.fishtank" %% "css-selectors-scala" % version

The versions available can be found in the repo or by looking at the tags for this project.