Installing a .tar.bz2 in windows

Question

I am a newbie to installing python extensions working on Windows 7, running Python 2.6 - I need to install the Levenshtein library from

http://code.google.com/p/pylevenshtein/downloads/detail?name=python-Levenshtein-0.10.1.tar.bz2&can=2&q=

When I unzip the downloaded file, it gives me the following list of files:

• COPYING
• gendoc.sh
• Levenshtein.c
• Levenshtein.h
• MANIFEST
• NEWS
• PKG-INFO
• README
• setup.cfg
• setup.py
• StringMatcher.py

How do I install the Levenshtein library so I could import and use it into my python code?

Answer 1

Here is quite a large section of the documentation easily found by doing some research .

http://docs.python.org/install/index.html

It appears that you will want to run:

python setup.py install --prefix="\Temp\Python"

to install modules to the \\Temp\\Python directory on the current drive.

Some more info:

If you don't choose an installation directory—ie, if you just run setup.py install—then the install command installs to the standard location for third-party Python modules.

The default installation directory on Windows was C:\\Program Files\\Python under Python 1.6a1, 1.5.2, and earlier.

Answer 2

Assuming you have Python already installed on on you PATH, you can do this:

python setup.py install

However, it seems to have a compiled extension so you will probably also need a complete Windows development environment to install that (it is a source distribution). So if you don't it may not work. Your best bet would be to find that as an MSI package, if you can.