Python & requests | ImportError: No module named util

Question

I just installed the package requests on a new computer. I'm getting this error when I try to import that module. Any ideas what's causing the issue w/ the util module?

Python 2.7.6 (v2.7.6:3a1db0d2747e, Nov 10 2013, 00:42:54) 

[GCC 4.2.1 (Apple Inc. build 5666) (dot 3)] on darwin

Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.

>>> import requests

Traceback (most recent call last):

File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
File "/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/lib/python2.7/site-packages/requests-2.3.0-py2.7.egg/requests/__init__.py", line 58, in <module>
  from . import utils
File "/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/lib/python2.7/site-packages/requests-2.3.0-py2.7.egg/requests/utils.py", line 25, in <module>
  from .compat import parse_http_list as _parse_list_header
File "/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/lib/python2.7/site-packages/requests-2.3.0-py2.7.egg/requests/compat.py", line 7, in <module>
  from .packages import chardet
File "/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/lib/python2.7/site-packages/requests-2.3.0-py2.7.egg/requests/packages/__init__.py", line 3, in <module>
  from . import urllib3
File "/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/lib/python2.7/site-packages/requests-2.3.0-py2.7.egg/requests/packages/urllib3/__init__.py", line 16, in <module>
  from .connectionpool import (
File "/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/lib/python2.7/site-packages/requests-2.3.0-py2.7.egg/requests/packages/urllib3/connectionpool.py", line 36, in <module>
  from .connection import (
File "/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/lib/python2.7/site-packages/requests-2.3.0-py2.7.egg/requests/packages/urllib3/connection.py", line 43, in <module>
  from .util import (
ImportError: No module named util

Solution

on pypi.python.org I see, that latest version of requests is 2.2.1

Your listing shows, you have installed version 2.3.0, so it is likely, you are using development version which is not yet really completed.

Uninstal it:

$ pip uninstall requests

And install production quality one:

$ pip install requests

In case, it would still mess up with version 2.3.0, install explicitly the 2.2.1

$ pip install requests==2.2.1

Comments

[shartshooter]

I just tried sudo pip uninstall requests and it seemed to go well.I tried installing exactly 2.2.1 and got the same error, so I re-removed requests and tried a test of import requests and got the same error. ImportError: No module named util

[Jan Vlcinsky]

@user3195487 This is strange. Can you test it using virtualenv? This shall provide very clean environment for such a test.

[Jan Vlcinsky]

@user3195487 When you do $ pip freeze|grep requests, what version of requests is shown there?

[shartshooter]

I figured out the issue. i had installed requests without using pip so I had to manually remove it. Just tried to install pip with your advice and it worked great. Thanks for the help!

[Jan Vlcinsky]

@user3195487 Great. Learn using pip even for installing development packages - it is very powerful tool, allows installing from pypi, eggs, wheels, from local source directories, from git... And it finally become part of Python in 3.4

[shartshooter]

yeah, I'm definitely new to python, unix and pip. Should I always be installing packages w/ sudo pip install packageName? or is there a different way of doing this?

[Jan Vlcinsky]

@user3195487 We are getting off track. But last recommendation is: install virtualenv and virtualenvwrapper. virtualenv comes with pip installed and allows you to create any number of well isolated development environments. virtualenvwrapper gives you a commands like workon which switch to diferent environemnts.

[shartshooter]

Cool, I'll play around with that.

[Jan Vlcinsky]

let us continue this discussion in chat