How can I install the Beautiful Soup module on the Mac?

The "normal" way is to:

• Go to the Beautiful Soup web site, http://www.crummy.com/software/BeautifulSoup/
• Download the package
• Unpack it
• In a Terminal window, cd to the resulting directory
• Type python setup.py install

Another solution is to use easy_install. Go to http://peak.telecommunity.com/DevCenter/EasyInstall), install the package using the instructions on that page, and then type, in a Terminal window:

easy_install BeautifulSoup4
# for older v3:
# easy_install BeautifulSoup

easy_install will take care of downloading, unpacking, building, and installing the package. The advantage to using easy_install is that it knows how to search for many different Python packages, because it queries the PyPI registry. Thus, once you have easy_install on your machine, you install many, many different third-party packages simply by one command at a shell.

Brian beat me too it, but since I already have the transcript:

easy_install

aaron@ares ~$ sudo easy_install BeautifulSoup
Searching for BeautifulSoup
Best match: BeautifulSoup 3.0.7a
Processing BeautifulSoup-3.0.7a-py2.5.egg
BeautifulSoup 3.0.7a is already the active version in easy-install.pth

Using /Library/Python/2.5/site-packages/BeautifulSoup-3.0.7a-py2.5.egg
Processing dependencies for BeautifulSoup
Finished processing dependencies for BeautifulSoup

.. or the normal boring way:

aaron@ares ~/Downloads$ curl http://www.crummy.com/software/BeautifulSoup/download/BeautifulSoup.tar.gz > bs.tar.gz
  % Total    % Received % Xferd  Average Speed   Time    Time     Time  Current
                                 Dload  Upload   Total   Spent    Left  Speed
100 71460  100 71460    0     0  84034      0 --:--:-- --:--:-- --:--:--  111k

aaron@ares ~/Downloads$ tar -xzvf bs.tar.gz 
BeautifulSoup-3.1.0.1/
BeautifulSoup-3.1.0.1/BeautifulSoup.py
BeautifulSoup-3.1.0.1/BeautifulSoup.py.3.diff
BeautifulSoup-3.1.0.1/BeautifulSoupTests.py
BeautifulSoup-3.1.0.1/BeautifulSoupTests.py.3.diff
BeautifulSoup-3.1.0.1/CHANGELOG
BeautifulSoup-3.1.0.1/README
BeautifulSoup-3.1.0.1/setup.py
BeautifulSoup-3.1.0.1/testall.sh
BeautifulSoup-3.1.0.1/to3.sh
BeautifulSoup-3.1.0.1/PKG-INFO
BeautifulSoup-3.1.0.1/BeautifulSoup.pyc
BeautifulSoup-3.1.0.1/BeautifulSoupTests.pyc

aaron@ares ~/Downloads$ cd BeautifulSoup-3.1.0.1/

aaron@ares ~/Downloads/BeautifulSoup-3.1.0.1$ sudo python setup.py install
running install
<... snip ...>