Does JSSoup support select() similar to Beautiful Soup or JSoup?

Question

Does JSSoup support select() similar to Beautiful Soup or JSoup?

1.1k Views Asked by Markus Weninger At 27 April 2025 at 15:10

Does JSSoup (which itself states "JavaScript + BeautifulSoup = JSSoup") support a select() operation similar to Beautiful Soup or JSoup to select elements based on a CSS selector?

I did not find it, does it probably exist with a different name?

Original Q&A

There are 3 best solutions below

Markus Weninger On 29 December 2020 at 12:14

Based on the already given answers, I just want to add: One can also just search by class name (without a tag name) by setting the tag name to undefined in find() and findAll():

mySoup.findAll(undefined, 'myClass');

T.J. Crowder On 29 December 2020 at 11:34

From the documentation, it appears to be called find or findAll depending on whether you want to find one or many. Here's an example they give:

var data = `
<div>
  <p> hello </p>
  <p> world </p>
</div>
`
var soup = new JSSoup(data);
soup.find('p')
// <p> hello </p>

Looking at the source, I don't see anything offering CSS selector functionality, but it did show that find and findAll accept more than one argument, and an example in the documentation for BeautifulSoup shows using the second argument to filter by class, e.g.:

const JSSoup = require('jssoup').default;
const data = `
<div>
    <p class="foo bar"> hello </p>
    <p> world </p>
</div>
`
const soup = new JSSoup(data);
console.log(soup.find('p', 'foo').toString()); // Logs: <p class="foo bar">hello</p>

The second argument can be used for other attributes as well, but CSS selectors don't seem to be an option.

You have other options, such as jsdom, which has all the usual DOM stuff such as querySelector and querySelectorAll:

const { JSDOM } = require("jsdom");
const data = `
<div>
    <p class="foo bar"> hello </p>
    <p> world </p>
</div>
`;
const dom = new JSDOM(data);
const doc = dom.window.document;
console.log(doc.querySelector(".foo").outerHTML); // Logs: <p class="foo bar"> hello </p>

**Mr. Polywhirl** · Accepted Answer

You will not be able to utilize selector querying similar to querySelector and querySelectorAll.

Here is the findAll definition in JSsoup:

{
  key: 'findAll',
  value: function findAll() {
    var name = arguments.length > 0 && arguments[0] !== undefined ? arguments[0] : undefined;
    var attrs = arguments.length > 1 && arguments[1] !== undefined ? arguments[1] : undefined;
    var string = arguments.length > 2 && arguments[2] !== undefined ? arguments[2] : undefined;
    // ...
    var strainer = new SoupStrainer(name, attrs, string);
    // ...
  }
}

And here is the SoupStrainer constructor:

function SoupStrainer(name, attrs, string) {
  _classCallCheck(this, SoupStrainer);

  if (typeof attrs == 'string') {
    attrs = { class: [attrs] };
  } else if (Array.isArray(attrs)) {
    attrs = { class: attrs };
  } else if (attrs && attrs.class && typeof attrs.class == 'string') {
    attrs.class = [attrs.class];
  }
  if (attrs && attrs.class) {
    for (var i = 0; i < attrs.class.length; ++i) {
      attrs.class[i] = attrs.class[i].trim();
    }
  }
  this.name = name;
  this.attrs = attrs;
  this.string = string;
  }

You are required to pass a tag name as the first argument, followed by attributes. A string is treated as a class name.

Example usage

const JSSoup = require('jssoup').default;

const html = `
<html>
  <head>
    <title>Hello World</title>
  </head>
  <body>
    <h1>Hello World</h1>
    <p class="foo">First</p>
    <p class="foo bar">Second</p>
    <div class="foo">Third</div>
  </body>
</html>
`;

const printTags = (tags) => console.log(tags.map(t => t.toString()).join(' '));

const soup = new JSSoup(html);

printTags(soup.findAll('p', 'foo'));
// <p class="foo">First</p> <p class="foo">Second</p>

printTags(soup.findAll('p', { class: 'foo' }));
// <p class="foo">First</p> <p class="foo">Second</p>

printTags(soup.findAll('p', { class: 'foo' }, 'Second'));
// <p class="foo">Second</p>

printTags(soup.findAll('p', { class: ['foo', 'bar'] }));
// <p class="foo">Second</p>

printTags(soup.findAll(null, 'bar'));
// <p class="foo bar">Second</p> <div class="foo">Third</div>

Does JSSoup support select() similar to Beautiful Soup or JSoup?

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Example usage

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