A CSS selector is used to target and apply styles to specific HTML elements.

CSS Selectors

CSS selectors provide a simple method for targeting HTML elements by their id, class, type, attributes, and other criteria.

CSS selectors can be categorized into five groups:

• Simple selectors
• Combinator selectors 
• Pseudo-class selectors
• Pseudo-elements selectors 
• Attribute selectors

CSS element Selector

The element selector chooses HTML elements using their tag names.

Example

Here, all <p> elements on the page will be left, with white text color and black background-color.

p {
  text-align: left;
  color: white;
  background-color:black;
}

CSS id Selector

The id selector picks a special element using its unique id name in HTML. This id name is unique on a page. To select an element with a certain id, use # followed by the id name.

Example

Now we have applied CSS on the HTML element with id=”school”

#school {
   text-align: left;
   color: white;
   background-color:black;
}

CSS class Selector

The class selector picks out HTML elements that have a particular class name attribute.

To style elements with a specific class, utilize a dot (.) followed by the class name for selecting and applying the class’s styling.

Example

In this example, all HTML elements with class=”school” will be white text-color, left text-align and black background-color.

#school {
   text-align: left;
   color: white;
   background-color: black;
}

CSS Universal Selector

The universal selector (*) targets and selects all HTML elements on the page.

Example

* {
  text-align: left;
  color: white;
  background-color:black;
}

CSS Grouping Selector

The grouping selector selects multiple HTML elements that share the same style definitions.

Consider the following CSS code (where h1, h2, and p elements have identical style definitions).

Example

h1 {
  text-align: center;
  color: red;
}
h2 {
  text-align: center;
  color: red;
}
p {
  text-align: center;
  color: red;
}

Use commas to group selectors and keep your code concise.

Example

h1, h2, p {
  text-align: center;
  color: red;
}

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