BeautifulSoup import error

Question

I am trying to write a simple, local python script to do some html parsing. I installed beautifulsoup4 and imported it using

from bs4 import BeautifulSoup

But I get the error:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "scrape_descriptions.py", line 1, in <module>
    from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
ImportError: No module named 'bs4'

I've tried installing BS4 in just about every way. First I did

sudo pip install BeautifulSoup4

then I tried downloading the actual files from the website and running

sudo python setup.py install

and finally I tried

sudo su
easy_install BeautifulSoup4

All of these operations appear to have completed successfully. But I'm still getting this error. I've scoured other posts but pretty much all of them are just installation instructions, which I've already done.

Typing

pip freeze

shows that bs4 is installed but running

$ python3 -i
>>> help('modules')

does not appear to list bs4.

Edit 1: Running sudo pip3 install BeautifulSoup gives this error:

Downloading/unpacking BeautifulSoup
  Downloading BeautifulSoup-3.2.1.tar.gz
  Running setup.py (path:/private/tmp/pip_build_root/BeautifulSoup/setup.py) egg_info for package BeautifulSoup
    Traceback (most recent call last):
      File "<string>", line 17, in <module>
      File "/private/tmp/pip_build_root/BeautifulSoup/setup.py", line 22
        print "Unit tests have failed!"
                                      ^
    SyntaxError: invalid syntax
    Complete output from command python setup.py egg_info:
    Traceback (most recent call last):

  File "<string>", line 17, in <module>

  File "/private/tmp/pip_build_root/BeautifulSoup/setup.py", line 22

    print "Unit tests have failed!"

                                  ^

SyntaxError: invalid syntax

----------------------------------------
Cleaning up...
Command python setup.py egg_info failed with error code 1 in /private/tmp/pip_build_root/BeautifulSoup
Storing debug log for failure in /Users/griff/.pip/pip.log

Edit 2: Solved! The reason pip3 was failing was because I was using

sudo pip3 install BeautifulSoup

instead of

sudo pip3 install BeautifulSoup4

which worked. Thanks!

Answer 1

The solution is:

sudo pip3 install BeautifulSoup4