I'm getting AttributeError: 'NoneType' object has no attribute 'find'

Question

Hi this is a my code to retrieve the first topic in the ycombinator website. When I run the code I get-

AttributeError: 'NoneType' object has no attribute 'find'for the line 
level2= data.level1.find('table',attrs = {'id':'hnmain'})

The topics are nested deep within various tags which is why I proceeded as below. I'm just doing this for practice so I know this might not be the best way to code as its my first day and I just want to know how to get past the error.

import requests
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
response1= requests.get('https://news.ycombinator.com/')
response = response1.text

data = BeautifulSoup(response,"html.parser")

level1= data.body.find('centre')
level2= data.level1.find('table',attrs = {'id':'hnmain'})
level3= data.level2.find('tbody')
level4= data.level3.find('tr')
level5= data.level4.find('td')
level6= data.level5.find('table.itemlist')
level7= data.level6.find('tbody')
level8= data.level7.find('tr#15426209.athing')
level9= data.level8.find('td.title')
level10= data.level9.find('a.storylink')
print(level10.text)

Answer 1

I think you're getting the error because of the data.body portion. I've never seen it done that way tbh.

Here's a modified version of your code that works:

import requests
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup

r = requests.get('https://news.ycombinator.com')

soup = BeautifulSoup(r.text, 'lxml')

# print soup.prettify()

stories = []

for a in soup.find_all('a', attrs={'class': 'storylink'}):
    stories.append([a.text, a['href']])

print stories[0]

[u'Using Binary Diffing to Discover Windows Kernel Memory Disclosure Bugs', 'https://googleprojectzero.blogspot.com/2017/10/using-binary-diffing-to-discover.html']

I've commented out soup.prettify(), but you can uncomment it and see what it does - it shows you the source code of the page in a nicely organized way.