req = requests.get(url)
tree = etree.HTML(req.text)
now instead of using xpath tree.xpath(...) I would like to know if we can search by class name of id as we do in beautifulSoup
soup.find('div',attrs={'class':'myclass'}) I'm looking for something similar in lxml.
The far more concise way to do that in bs4 is to use a css selector:
soup.select('div.myclass') # == soup.find_all('div',attrs={'class':'myclass'})
lxml provides cssselect as a module (which actually compiles XPath expressions) and as a convenience method on Element objects.
import lxml.html
tree = lxml.html.fromstring(req.text)
for div in tree.cssselect('div.myclass'):
#stuff
Or optionally you can pre-compile the expression and apply that to your Element:
from lxml.cssselect import CSSSelector
selector = CSSSelector('div.myclass')
selection = selector(tree)
You say that you don't want to use xpath but don't explain why. If the goal is to search for a tag with a given class, you can do that easily with xpath.
For example, to find a div with the class "foo" you could do something like this:
tree.find("//div[@class='foo']")
