ImportError: No module named mechanize

Question

I'm using easy_install, and I entered:

easy_install mechanize

and the last line it returned was:

Finished processing dependencies for mechanize

Now when I try to:

import mechanize

I get this error:

ImportError: No module named mechanize

Any idea what's wrong? Thanks

Solution

Have you checked sys.path in the python shell?

>>> import sys
>>> sys.path
# Returns a list of directories & .egg files

For python to find mechanize, it needs to be in one of the places listed on sys.path. If you know where mechanize was installed, then you can check directly whether it's on sys.path (I'm not sure how to find out where it was installed automagically).

Comments

[mid_kid]

While this works and is a reasonable solution, I would recommend using the system python installation as long as you don't need separate environments.

[Mantas Vidutis]

I disagree. Virtualenv is a requirement for everything short of introductions to programming. The earlier you learn it and start using it, the better. Your system python should only have pip, ipython and virtualenv installed.