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

Source code can be:

import urllib
sock = urllib.urlopen("http://diveintopython.org/")
htmlSource = sock.read()                            
sock.close()                                        
print htmlSource  

Answer 2

import os,requests
def download(url):
    get_response = requests.get(url,stream=True)
    file_name  = url.split("/")[-1]
    with open(file_name, 'wb') as f:
        for chunk in get_response.iter_content(chunk_size=1024):
            if chunk: # filter out keep-alive new chunks
                f.write(chunk)


download("https://example.com/example.jpg")

Answer 3

I wrote the following, which works in vanilla Python 2 or Python 3.

---

import sys
try:
    import urllib.request
    python3 = True
except ImportError:
    import urllib2
    python3 = False


def progress_callback_simple(downloaded,total):
    sys.stdout.write(
        "\r" +
        (len(str(total))-len(str(downloaded)))*" " + str(downloaded) + "/%d"%total +
        " [%3.2f%%]"%(100.0*float(downloaded)/float(total))
    )
    sys.stdout.flush()

def download(srcurl, dstfilepath, progress_callback=None, block_size=8192):
    def _download_helper(response, out_file, file_size):
        if progress_callback!=None: progress_callback(0,file_size)
        if block_size == None:
            buffer = response.read()
            out_file.write(buffer)

            if progress_callback!=None: progress_callback(file_size,file_size)
        else:
            file_size_dl = 0
            while True:
                buffer = response.read(block_size)
                if not buffer: break

                file_size_dl += len(buffer)
                out_file.write(buffer)

                if progress_callback!=None: progress_callback(file_size_dl,file_size)
    with open(dstfilepath,"wb") as out_file:
        if python3:
            with urllib.request.urlopen(srcurl) as response:
                file_size = int(response.getheader("Content-Length"))
                _download_helper(response,out_file,file_size)
        else:
            response = urllib2.urlopen(srcurl)
            meta = response.info()
            file_size = int(meta.getheaders("Content-Length")[0])
            _download_helper(response,out_file,file_size)

import traceback
try:
    download(
        "https://geometrian.com/data/programming/projects/glLib/glLib%20Reloaded%200.5.9/0.5.9.zip",
        "output.zip",
        progress_callback_simple
    )
except:
    traceback.print_exc()
    input()

---

Notes:

• Supports a "progress bar" callback.
• Download is a 4 MB test .zip from my website.

Answer 4

If you have wget installed, you can use parallel_sync.

pip install parallel_sync

from parallel_sync import wget
urls = ['http://something.png', 'http://somthing.tar.gz', 'http://somthing.zip']
wget.download('/tmp', urls)
# or a single file:
wget.download('/tmp', urls[0], filenames='x.zip', extract=True)

Doc: https://pythonhosted.org/parallel_sync/pages/examples.html

This is pretty powerful. It can download files in parallel, retry upon failure , and it can even download files on a remote machine.