CSS has some great selectors built in that some people don't know about. Learning about these can make life easier when styling your webpages. For instance, you can select the even and odd elements, the first and last, the siblings, and so much more. In this article we'll go through different scenarios of CSS selectors and how to use them. We won't dive into the known selectors like choosing by ID and class, but we'll just go through some under the radar selectors.

Let's get started with the selectors. For the simple selectors, we'll just explain how they work. For the more advanced ones, you'll see a Codepen of the selector in

First Line and First Letter

p:first-letter Style just the first letter in the paragraph p:first-line Style just the first line in the paragraph

See the Pen peHtI by Chris Sevilleja (@sevilayha) on CodePen

Before and After

:before Add elements before the current element using content in CSS :after Add elements after the current element using content in CSS

See the Pen ugaKi by Chris Sevilleja (@sevilayha) on CodePen

Siblings and Children

body > p Select p tags that are only immediate children (can't be nested) h1 + p Select the p sibling immediately following the h1 tag h1 ~ pre Find all pre that follow the h1 tag

Target Pseudo Class

Style a Specific Target :target

Selector URL Div *:target http://example.com/about.html#thebox stuff in here styled

This one's pretty cool. If somebody accesses your site using http://example.com/about.html#thebox, :target will style the div with ID of thebox.

This could definitely be used when you are trying to link to a specific comment on a page and want to highlight it.

:nth-child Pseudo Classes

tr:first-child / tr:last-child First or last rows tr:nth-child(odd) / tr:nth-child(even) Choose every odd or even rows tr:nth-child(10n-1) Every 9th, 19th, 29th, etc element tr:nth-child(-n+6) First 6 rows of a table tr:nth-child(-n+6) First 6 rows of a table

Attribute Selectors

[attr~="value"] a[rel~="copyright"] Any elements with "value" in a list of attributes separated by white spaces [attr|="value"] a[hreflang|="en"] Attribute value begins with and/or is followed by a dash. This will also select en-US, en-scouse, and anything that begins with en [attr^="value"] img[src^="images/"] Values begin with a certain string [attr$="value"] a[href$=".html"] Values end in a certain string

So Many More

CSS has so many more selectors that aren't covered here. There are things like :nth-of-type . View the full selectors at the official W3 Site.

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