List inside a list BeautifulSoup unclosed <li> extraction issue

user_15823047 0
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SO i am having issue with extracting values from a security advisory, a section is as below

<ul>
  <li>
   ABC
   <ul>
    <li>
     XYZ
    </li>
    <li>
     PQR
    </li>

when i do a find_all on li and iterate and print it i get

ABCXYZPQR
XYZ
PQR

instead of what i want to get is

ABC
XYZ
PQR

i understand this is happening because the li for ABC is not closed so it is reading the whole sublist

what i am unble to figure out is how do i extract just ABC, there is not way to split it also post converting it to string because there is no common thing to split it on

beautifulsoup python
1 Answers

You can use a recursive generator function:

import bs4
def get_li(d):
   if d.name == 'li':
     yield ''.join(str(i).strip() for i in d.contents if isinstance(i, bs4.NavigableString))
   for i in d.contents:
      if not isinstance(i, bs4.NavigableString):
         yield from get_li(i)

source = bs4.BeautifulSoup(html, 'html.parser')
print(list(get_li(source)))

Output:

['ABC', 'XYZ', 'PQR']
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