How can I install the Beautiful Soup module on the Mac?

Question

I read this without finding the solution: http://docs.python.org/install/index.html

Answer 1

The "normal" way is to:

• Go to the Beautiful Soup web site, http://www.crummy.com/software/BeautifulSoup/
• Download the package
• Unpack it
• In a Terminal window, cd to the resulting directory
• Type python setup.py install

Another solution is to use easy_install. Go to http://peak.telecommunity.com/DevCenter/EasyInstall), install the package using the instructions on that page, and then type, in a Terminal window:

easy_install BeautifulSoup4 # for older v3: # easy_install BeautifulSoup 

easy_install will take care of downloading, unpacking, building, and installing the package. The advantage to using easy_install is that it knows how to search for many different Python packages, because it queries the PyPI registry. Thus, once you have easy_install on your machine, you install many, many different third-party packages simply by one command at a shell.

Answer 2

I think the current right way to do this is by pip like Pramod comments

pip install beautifulsoup4 

because of last changes in Python, see discussion here. This was not so in the past.