Install Beautiful Soup using pip

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?

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

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.

import os

os.system("pip install beautifulsoup4")

or

import subprocess

exe = subprocess.Popen("pip install beautifulsoup4")

exe_out = exe.communicate()

print(exe_out)

If you have more than one version of Python installed, run the respective pip command.

For example, for Python 3.6 run the following

pip3.6 install beautifulsoup4

To check the available command/version of pip and python on Mac run

ls /usr/local/bin