How to get immediate child of using cheerio

I have html file html content like this :

<ul>
    <li class="class_1">111</li>
    <li class="class_2">
        <ul>
            <li class="class_3">222</li>
            <li class="class_4">333</li>
        </ul>    
    </li>
    <li class="class_5">444</li>
</ul> 

After Loading html content in cheerio module and while searching for immediate li childs it’s getting all items from child ul as well like this :

this._$$=cheerio.load(<htmlContent>, {xmlMode : true});
const liElements = this._$$(`ul > *`);

When i print liElements in after converting to html content i am getting output like this :

<li class="class_1">111</li>
<li class="class_2">
     <ol>
         <li class="class_3">222</li>
         <li class="class_4">333</li>
     </ol>    
</li>
<li class="class_5">444</li>
<li class="class_3">222</li>
<li class="class_4">333</li>

You can see content from child ul is repeating here. I tried a lots of options from cheerio documentation but no luck. Can any help me to get immediate li child of ul.

Many Thanks in Advance.

Answer

the issue is that ul > *is too generic and it will return all the ul child even ones inside ul under li tag

maybe you have two solutions to fix this situation

1) put a class name on top ul

<ul class="main-ul">
    <li class="class_1">111</li>
    <li class="class_2">
        <ul>
            <li class="class_3">222</li>
            <li class="class_4">333</li>
        </ul>    
    </li>
    <li class="class_5">444</li>
</ul> 

selector became const liElements = this._$$(.main-ul > li);

2) get child of ul inside li tag and remove them from list of all child

const liWithLiParent= this._$$(`li > ul > *`);
const liElements = this._$$(`ul > *`).filter(li => !liWithLiParent.some(liWithParent => liWithParent === li));