[Tutor] Running programs that import 3rd party packages installed using pip.

Roger B. Atkins rba2124 at gmail.com
Wed Oct 3 23:20:35 EDT 2018


System:  Windows 10, Anaconda, Python 3, Spyder3

Problem: Running programs that import requests, pyperclip, bs4 and/or
other modules from 3rd party packages works fine within Spyder IDE,
but not from command line, or Win/R. The error message indicates no
such module. Therefore, my programs crash at the import statement. In
contrast, programs using built in modules work fine everywhere.
Questions: Which file needs to be found? Is this a path problem?

Efforts to solve problem:  After making sure I had correctly typed the
module names, my second guess was that it is a path problem, so I used
win explorer to locate the module files. I also went to the command
line and used "pip show modname".
The search using win explorer revealed module files in multiple
directories, so part of the problem may be that I don't know which
file the import statement needs to be able to find.
Based on results using pip show modname, the modules were installed in:
Anaconda3\lib\site-packages.
In fact, as shown in Win Explorer, they are in sub folders under
\site-packages, and there are 'regular' py files as well as compiled
files. (I'm a beginner, and thought Python was interpreted?)

I changed my system path variable to include:
C:\Users\rba21\Anaconda3\lib\site-packages    # Result: same error message
C:\Users\rba21\Anaconda3\lib\site-packages\pyperclip  # Result: same
error message
I tried adding the sub folders down to __pycache__  but got the same
error message.

I did some web searches, but didn't find anything that enabled me to
fix the problem.


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