Question

I downloaded the beautifulsoup installation files and `python setup.py install’ command fails since it appears to be written in earlier version of python and print method doesn’t have braces around the text.

How do I install it in this scenario besides going and fixing all such errors manually?

Answer 1

BeautifulSoup 3.2 is not supported on Python 3. You can use BeautifulSoup 3.1 instead. From the BeautifulSoup homepage:

If you’re using Python 3.0, you must use the 3.1 series. Beautiful Soup version 3.1.0.1 was released January 6, 2009. It won’t work very well—I consider it a failed experiment—but nothing else works with Python 3.0 at all. This document describes the problems you’ll run into, and explains why I abandoned this series.

Note that fixing this goes beyond adding braces to print statements: BeautifulSoup 3.2 uses the sgmllib library, which has been removed in Python 3.