Why am I getting the error “cannot import name Scanner” when I try to use the mwclient module for Python?

Question

I'm using Python 2.5.2 (because mwclient still only works for 2.x). I've copied the mwclient folder into the /usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages/mwclient folder, and when I run a program that imports mwclient I get this:

  Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "get_wiki.py", line 2, in <module>
    import mwclient
  File "/usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages/PIL/__init__.py", line 32, in <module>

  File "/usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages/mwclient/client.py", line 8, in <module>
    import simplejson
  File "/usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages/PIL/__init__.py", line 95, in <module>

  File "/home/troy/eo_project/code/3rd_party/mwclient/simplejson/decoder.py", line 6, in <module>
ImportError: cannot import name Scanner

Scanner seens to exist in the file decoder.py, so I can't figure out what could be wrong.

I'm not set on using mwclient, but I want something that will parse out the mediawiki and HTMl tags whenever possible. I'm looking for plain text to train my language detection program.

Answer 1

Remove the simplejson subdirectory in mwclient if you already have simplejson installed. Or download the latest version from SVN; it has been fixed.