What does "module object is not callable" mean?

Question

I'm using the .get_data() method with mechanize, which appears to print out the html that I want. I also check the type of what it prints out, and the type is 'str'.

But when I try to parse the str with BeautifulSoup, I get the following error:

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
TypeError                                 Traceback (most recent call last)
<ipython-input-163-11c061bf6c04> in <module>()
      7     html = get_html(first[i],last[i])
      8     print type(html)
----> 9     print parse_page(html)
     10 #     l_to_store.append(parse_page(html))
     11 # hfb_data['l_to_store']=l_to_store

<ipython-input-161-bedc1ba19b10> in parse_hfb_page(html)
      3     parse html to extract info in connection with a particular person
      4     '''
----> 5     soup = BeautifulSoup(html)
      6     for el in soup.find_all('li'):
      7         if el.find('span').contents[0]=='Item:':

TypeError: 'module' object is not callable

What exactly is 'module', and how do I get what get_data() returns into html?

Answer 1

When you import BeatufilulSoup like this:

import BeautifulSoup

You are importing the module which contains classes, functions etc. In order to instantiate a BeautifulSoup class instance form the BeautifulSoup module you need to either import it or use the full name including the module prefix like yonili suggests in the comment above:

from BeautifulSoup import BeautifulSoup
soup = BeautifulSoup(html)

or

import BeautifulSoup
soup = BeautifulSoup.BeautifulSoup(html)