To specify the destination directory and save the file with the URL file name, do the following def download_file_to_dir(url, dst_dir):ĭownload_file(url, os. With open(dst_path, mode = 'wb') as local_file: import os import pprint import time import urllib.error import urllib.request def download_file(url, dst_path):
#PYTHON DOWNLOAD FILES CODE#
This code is a bit verbose for the sake of explanation. The following is an example of a function that downloads and saves a file by specifying the URL and destination path, and its usage. You can use the standard library only to download individual files by specifying their URLs no additional installation is required.
Batch download multiple images from a list of URLs.Extract the URL of the image on the web page.Write to a file in binary mode in open().One notable exception is the URL parsing features of the urllib. I’ve found the requests library to offer the easiest and most versatile APIs for common HTTP-related tasks. Final Thoughtsĭownloading files with Python is super simple and can be accomplished using the standard urllib functions.
Note: The wget.download function uses a combination of urllib, tempfile, and shutil to retrieve the downloaded data, save to a temporary file, and then move that file (and rename it) to the specified location. The wget Python library offers a method similar to the urllib and attracts a lot of attention to its name being identical to the Linux wget command. That’s beyond the scope of this tutorial. Note: downloaded files may require encoding in order to display properly. This is a directive aimed at web browsers that are receiving and displaying data that isn’t immediately applicable to downloading files. When a web browser loads a page (or file) it encodes it using the specified encoding from the host.Ĭommon encodings include UTF-8 and Latin-1.
There are some important aspects of this approach to keep in mind-most notably the binary format of data transfer. Instead, one must manually save streamed file data as follows: import requests However, it doesn’t feature a one-liner for downloading files. The Python requests module is a super friendly library billed as “HTTP for humans.” Offering very simplified APIs, requests lives up to its motto for even high-throughput HTTP-related demands. In other words, this is probably a safe approach for the foreseeable future. Note: urllib is considered “legacy” from Python 2 and, in the words of the Python documentation: “might become deprecated at some point in the future.” In my opinion, there’s a big divide between “might” become deprecated and “will” become deprecated. Request.urlretrieve(remote_url, local_file) Let’s consider a basic example of downloading the robots.txt file from : from urllib import request This includes parsing, requesting, and-you guessed it-downloading files. Pythons’ urllib library offers a range of functions designed to handle common URL-related tasks. This article outlines 3 ways to download a file using python with a short discussion of each. Other libraries, most notably the Python requests library, can provide a clearer API for those more concerned with higher-level operations.