[Tutor] beautifulSoup and .next iteration

[Jon Crump]

Daniel,

It was kind of you to respond, and your response was a model of clarity. 
You correctly surmised from my awkward framing of the question, that what 
I wanted was a list of sibling elements between one named anchor and the 
next. My problem was, in part, that I still don't think in terms of 
functional programming, thus, the function defs you proposed are very 
helpful models for me. I do, however, still need to work out how to make 
is_anchor() return true only if the anchor name attribute satisfies a 
given regex. Starting with your model, I'm sure I'll be able to figure 
this out.

Thanks so much for your time!

Jon

>
> You might find the following definitions helpful:
>
> #############################################################
> def get_siblings_to_next_anchor(anchor):
>    """Anchor Tag -> element list
>
>    Given an anchor element, returns all the nextSiblings elements up to
>    (but not including) the next anchor as a list of either Tags or
>    NavigatableStrings."""
>
>    elt = anchor.nextSibling
>    results = []
>    while (elt != None) and (not is_anchor(elt)):
>        results.append(elt)
>        elt = elt.nextSibling
>    return results
>
>
> def is_anchor(elt):
>    """element -> boolean
>    Returns true if the element is an anchor Tag."""
>
>    if isinstance(elt, NavigableString):
>        return False
>    else:
>        return elt.name == 'a'
> #############################################################