How can I pull specific nested elements with the same tag in Beautiful Soup?

Question

I am really new to Python, so I am still trying to figure out Beautiful Soup. I am trying to scrape a website and pull five elements that immediately follow the tag I have found in my code.

I have tried next.element, which only pulls the text of the tag that I used in my soup.find, and I have tried next.sibling, which returns as blank.

There are a number of 'first' and 'last' classes on the page, so I have to specify which line I want with the text. Here is what I am trying to scrape:

 <li>
        <ul>
            <li class="first">Maintenance</li>
                        <li>$number1</li>
                        <li>$number2</li>
                        <li>$number3</li>
                        <li>$number4</li>
                        <li>$number5</li>
                    <li class="last">$linetotal</li>
        </ul>
    </li>

This what I am trying:

for x,y in zip(make, model):
    url = ('https://URL with variables goes here')
    headers = {'User-Agent': 'Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_11_5) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/50.0.2661.102 Safari/537.36'}
    search = requests.get(url, headers = headers)
    html = search.text
    soup = BeautifulSoup(html, 'lxml')
    search_results = soup.find('li', class_ = 'first', text = re.compile('Maintenance'))
    try:
        d = search_results.next_element
        print(d)
    except:
        print('pass')  

The ultimate goal will be to append the array of number1:number5 into a list, but with the code above, the output is just 'Maintenance'. Where am I going wrong? Also, since I am so new, if you are able to provide context as well, I would be very appreciative.

Answer 1

Given your example, simplest way would be to append to the results list all the li elements that don't have a class defined.

from bs4 import BeautifulSoup

html = """ <li>
        <ul>
            <li class="first">Maintenance</li>
                        <li>$number1</li>
                        <li>$number2</li>
                        <li>$number3</li>
                        <li>$number4</li>
                        <li>$number5</li>
                    <li class="last">$linetotal</li>
        </ul>
    </li>"""

soup = BeautifulSoup(html, 'lxml')
start = soup.find('li', class_ = 'first').parent
result = []

for ele in start.find_all('li'):

    if not ele.get('class'):
        result.append(ele.text)

print(result)

Outputs:

['$number1', '$number2', '$number3', '$number4', '$number5']

Answer 2

You could use an xpath expression with something like tree.xpath

//li[@class='first' and text()='Maintenance']/following-sibling::li[not(@class)]

Eg

from lxml.html import fromstring
# url = ''
# tree = html.fromstring( requests.get(url).content)
h = '''
 <li>
    <ul>
        <li class="first">Maintenance</li>
        <li>$number1</li>
        <li>$number2</li>
        <li>$number3</li>
        <li>$number4</li>
        <li>$number5</li>
        <li class="last">$linetotal</li>
    </ul>
</li>
'''
tree = fromstring(h)
items = [item.text for item in tree.xpath("//li[@class='first' and text()='Maintenance']/following-sibling::li[not(@class)]")]
print(items)

Answer 3

Something along the line of QHarr's answer, but somewhat different:

 h = '''
   <li>
     <ul>
       <li class="first">Maintenance</li>
       <li>$number1</li>
       <li>$number2</li>
       <li>$number3</li>
       <li>$number4</li>
       <li>$number5</li>
       <li class="last">$linetotal</li>
   </ul>
</li>

  '''
from lxml import etree
doc = etree.fromstring(h)
for cost in doc.xpath('//li'): 
   if not 'class' in cost.attrib:
      print(cost.text)

Output:

$number1
$number2
$number3
$number4
$number5