Import error with spacy: "No module named en"

Question

I'm having trouble using the Python spaCy library. It seems to be installed correctly but at

from spacy.en import English

I get the following import error:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "spacy.py", line 1, in <module>
    from spacy.en import English
  File "/home/user/CmdData/spacy.py", line 1, in <module>
    from spacy.en import English
ImportError: No module named en

I'm not very familiar with Python but that's the standard import I saw online, and the library is installed:

$ pip list | grep spacy
spacy (0.99)

EDIT I tested renaming the file, but that's not the problem. I also get the same error when doing:

$ python -m spacy.en.download --force all
/usr/bin/python: No module named en

(The command is supposed to download some models)

Answer 1

You are facing this error because you named your own file spacy.py. Rename your file, and everything should work.

Answer 2

For windows, open cmd with admin right. Then,

python -m spacy download en 

You should see the shell prompt stating.

You can now load the model via spacy.load('en')

Answer 3

I had the same issue, and the problem was the folder where the module 'en' was stored (spacy/lang/en).

Typing:

from spacy.lang.en import English

fixed the issue.

This post was helpful in figuring this out.