Urllib to download file

Introduction -. This article will demonstrate how to download different types of files using urllib library. We will download a csv file and a zip file from the internet and store it in our local system. Methods used A typical use case for the urllib package is for downloading a file. Here we just open a URL that leads us to a zip and a csv file. Then we read the data and write it out to disk. A way to accomplish this is to use urlretrieve. The urlretrieve method will copy a network object to a local file.

The file it copies to is randomly named and goes into the temp directory unless you use the second parameter to urlretrieve where you can actually specify where you want the file saved.

This will save you a step and make your code much simpler. Code -. You can also download files using requests module. The get method of the requests module is used to download the file contents in binary format. You can then use the open method to open a file on your system, just like we did with the previous method, urllib2.

In the above script, the open method is used once again to write binary data to local file. If you execute the above script and go to your "Downloads" directory, you should see your newly downloaded JPG file named "cat3.

With the requests module, you can also easily retrieve relevant meta-data about your request, including the status code, headers and much more. In the above script, you can see how we access some of this meta-data. If you need to add customer headers, for example, all you need to do is create a dict with your headers and pass it to your get request:.

Check out our hands-on, practical guide to learning Git, with best-practices, industry-accepted standards, and included cheat sheet. Stop Googling Git commands and actually learn it! There are a ton more options and features to this library, so check out their great user guide for more info on how to use it. One of the simplest way to download files in Python is via wget module, which doesn't require you to open the destination file.

The download method of the wget module downloads files in just one line. The method accepts two parameters: the URL path of the file to download and local path where the file is to be stored. Here you should see your newly downloaded "cat4. Information about PEP20 for Request. You can use open chained to file. Debug Are you sure? That worked on debian9 using python3. I don't use 2. This doesn't work if you have to get round the Forbidden issue using stackoverflow.

Sevenearths is a Forbidden error. This usually happens when a website server attempts to block a bot. Seen as the solution you listed uses a user agent, it strongly looks like that site attepts to block bots which makes sense since it's a news site a user agent tricks the server into thinking it's a legitimate browser. Show 3 more comments. Sign up or log in Sign up using Google.

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