Python Beautifulsoup CSS selector not working

Question

I am trying to use a CSS selector on a specific tag on the webpage's source. This is what I have right now:

from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
import requests
import pprint
r2 = requests.get("http://spot311.calgary.ca/reports/15-00462387")
soup = BeautifulSoup(r2.text, 'html.parser')
pprint(soup.select("blockquote"))

On the page source, there is only one tag called "blockquote", but I am getting the error:

 pprint(soup.select("blockquote"))
TypeError: 'module' object is not callable

I googled around and turned up some people having issues where they only wrote

import BeautifulSoup

instead of

from BeautifulSoup import BeautifulSoup

But I already have

from bs4 import BeautifulSoup

which is correct for my python distribution, I know because I have another program that uses this import and it works just fine.

Am I just not using the selector right?

Answer 1

You need to import pprint() function from pprint module.

Replace:

import pprint

with:

from pprint import pprint

• wfgeo: Augh, so simple! I just got so tunnel visioned on the beautifulsoup module Thank you.

Answer 2

No, you can leave it as

import pprint

but when you call for it later you must write

pprint.pprint((soup.select("blockquote"))

In my beginner opinion, i think this is better formatting as it is clearer to see later on in big projects what module that function came from.