install beautiful soup using pip [duplicate]

Question

I am trying to install Beautiful Soup using pip in Python 2.7. I keep getting an error message and can't understand why.

I followed the instructions to install pip, which was installed to the following directory: c:\Python27\Scripts\pip.exe. Then I tried adding it to the path, and running the pip install package command.

I tried it two different ways:

import sys sys.path.append('C:\\Python27\\Scripts\\pip.exe') pip install beautifulsoup4  import sys sys.path.append('C:\\Python27\\Scripts') pip install beautifulsoup4 

Both give me this error message:

>>> pip install beautifulsoup4 SyntaxError: invalid syntax 

The shell is highlighting the word "install" and saying that it's invalid syntax.

What's going on?

Answer 1

pip is a command line tool, not Python syntax.

In other words, run the command in your console, not in the Python interpreter:

pip install beautifulsoup4 

You may have to use the full path:

C:\Python27\Scripts\pip install beautifulsoup4 

or even

C:\Python27\Scripts\pip.exe install beautifulsoup4 

Windows will then execute the pip program and that will use Python to install the package.

Another option is to use the Python -m command-line switch to run the pip module, which then operates exactly like the pip command:

python -m pip install beautifulsoup4 

or

python.exe -m pip install beautifulsoup4 

Answer 2

The easy method that will work even in a corrupted setup environment is:

To download ez_setup.py and run it using the command line,

python ez_setup.py 

Output

Extracting in c:\uu\uu\appdata\local\temp\tmpjxvil3
Now working in c:\u\u\appdata\local\temp\tmpjxvil3\setuptools-5.6
Installing Setuptools

Run

pip install beautifulsoup4 

Output

Downloading/unpacking beautifulsoup4
Running setup.py ... egg_info for package
Installing collected packages: beautifulsoup4
Running setup.py install for beautifulsoup4
Successfully installed beautifulsoup4
Cleaning up...

Bam! Done.