In a new post Fabien Potencier talks about how he took the Python lxml.cssselect component from Python, ported it over to PHP and made a library that allows you to parse XML with the handy CSS selectors rather than using XPath.

Odds are you [also] need to parse some from time to time: because you consume a web service and want to extract some information, or because you want to gather data from scraped web pages, or just because you want to write functional tests for a website.

The CssSelector tool allows you to convert a CSS selector into an XPath that can, in turn, be pushed into the XPath function of the PHP DOM XML functionality. He gives a few examples of using it for a simple "find" and for something more complex involving a SimpleXML object too.

The library can be downloaded from github here.