How do I download a file over HTTP using Python?

Question

I have a small utility that I use to download a MP3 from a website on a schedule and then builds/updates a podcast XML file which I've obviously added to iTunes.

The text processing that creates/updates the XML file is written in Python. I use wget inside a Windows .bat file to download the actual MP3 however. I would prefer to have the entire utility written in Python though.

I struggled though to find a way to actually down load the file in Python, thus why I resorted to wget.

So, how do I download the file using Python?

Answer 1

One more, using urlretrieve:

import urllib
urllib.urlretrieve ("http://www.example.com/songs/mp3.mp3", "mp3.mp3")

(for Python 3+ use 'import urllib.request' and urllib.request.urlretrieve)

Yet another one, with a "progressbar"

import urllib2

url = "http://download.thinkbroadband.com/10MB.zip"

file_name = url.split('/')[-1]
u = urllib2.urlopen(url)
f = open(file_name, 'wb')
meta = u.info()
file_size = int(meta.getheaders("Content-Length")[0])
print "Downloading: %s Bytes: %s" % (file_name, file_size)

file_size_dl = 0
block_sz = 8192
while True:
    buffer = u.read(block_sz)
    if not buffer:
        break

    file_size_dl += len(buffer)
    f.write(buffer)
    status = r"%10d  [%3.2f%%]" % (file_size_dl, file_size_dl * 100. / file_size)
    status = status + chr(8)*(len(status)+1)
    print status,

f.close()

Answer 2

import urllib2
mp3file = urllib2.urlopen("http://www.example.com/songs/mp3.mp3")
with open('test.mp3','wb') as output:
  output.write(mp3file.read())

The wb in open('test.mp3','wb') opens a file (and erases any existing file) in binary mode so you can save data with it instead of just text.

Answer 3

I agree with Corey, urllib2 is more complete than urllib and should likely be the module used if you want to do more complex things, but to make the answers more complete, urllib is a simpler module if you want just the basics:

import urllib
response = urllib.urlopen('http://www.example.com/sound.mp3')
mp3 = response.read()

Will work fine. Or, if you don't want to deal with the "response" object you can call read() directly:

import urllib
mp3 = urllib.urlopen('http://www.example.com/sound.mp3').read()

Answer 4

use wget module:

import wget
wget.download('url')

Answer 5

Wrote wget library in pure Python just for this purpose. It is pumped up urlretrieve with these features as of version 2.0.

Answer 6

In python3 you can use urllib3 and shutil libraires. Download them by using pip or pip3 (Depending whether python3 is default or not)

pip3 install urllib3 shutil

Then run this code

import urllib.request
import shutil

url = "http://www.somewebsite.com/something.pdf"
output_file = "save_this_name.pdf"
with urllib.request.urlopen(url) as response, open(output_file, 'wb') as out_file:
    shutil.copyfileobj(response, out_file)

Note that you download urllib3 but use urllib in code