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Problem Formulation: Given a PyCharm project. How to install the BeautifulSoup library in your project within a virtual environment or globally?
Here’s a solution that always works:
- Open
File > Settings > Projectfrom the PyCharm menu. - Select your current project.
- Click the
Python Interpretertab within your project tab. - Click the small
+symbol to add a new library to the project. - Now type in the library to be installed, in your example
"bs4"without quotes, and clickInstall Package. - Wait for the installation to terminate and close all popup windows.
Here’s the installation process as a short animated video—it works analogously for the BeautifulSoup library, just type in “bs4” in the search field instead:
Make sure to select only “bs4” because there are many other packages that are not required but also contain the same term (false positives):
Alternatively, you can run the pip install beautifulsoup4 or pip install bs4 command in your PyCharm “Terminal” view:
$ pip install beautifulsoup4 $ pip install bs4
The following figure shows how to use pip to install the BeautifulSoup package:
You can check your installation using the following two lines of Python code that print out the version of the package:
import bs4 print(bs4.__version__)
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