How to select HTML elements by text using CSS selectors?
Learn how to target HTML elements based on their text content using CSS selectors. This guide provides a straightforward approach to enhance your data extraction techniques efficiently.
Best practices
Use JavaScript or a library like jQuery for text selection in HTML elements to ensure compatibility across all browsers, as the `:contains()` selector is not officially supported in CSS.
When using text-based selectors, consider the impact of dynamic content changes and ensure your CSS or JavaScript updates accordingly to maintain styling.
For performance optimization, avoid overly broad text selectors in large documents; instead, target more specific elements or use class and ID selectors to narrow down the selection.
Remember to handle cases where the text may change due to localization or updates, possibly using data attributes or other stable identifiers instead of text content for styling decisions.
/* Select elements containing specific text */
div:contains('Example Text') {
color: red;
}
/* This selector targets elements with exact text match */
a:contains('Click Here') {
background-color: yellow;
}
/* Select elements whose text contains a specific substring */
p:contains('important') {
font-weight: bold;
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