Question

I am trying to execute a command inside a Python script:

import subprocess
output_process = 
   subprocess.Popen("javac -cp C:\Users\MyUsername\Desktop\htmlcleaner-2.2.jar Scrapping_lastfm.java",
                    shell=True, stdout=subprocess.PIPE)

But I am getting an error package org.htmlcleaner does not exist.

If I run the javac command independently, it executes fine..

My current working directry is C:\Users\MyUsername.

Answer 1

The error is not raised by python but by the java subprocess. Most likely the java machine is not finding some libraries, and that refines the problem to a PATH configuration problem, most likely
the variable CLASSPATH has not been set in the environment. to solve :

import shlex

JAVA_COMMAND=r"javac -cp C:\\Users\\MyUsername\\Desktop\\htmlcleaner-2.2.jar Scrapping_lastfm.java"

cmdline = shlex.split(JAVA_COMMAND)

output_process = subprocess.Popen(cmdline,shell=True, stdout=subprocess.PIPE, env={'CLASSPATH':'/path/to/java/packages'})