Download a web file with python

The open method accepts two parameters, the path to the local file and the mode in which data will be written. Here "wb" states that the open method should have permission to write binary data to the given file. Execute the above script and go to your "Downloads" directory. You should see the downloaded pdf document as "cat2. 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. Skip to content. Change Language. Related Articles.

Table of Contents. Improve Article. Save Article. Like Article. Saving received content as a png file in. URL of the archive web-page which provides link to. It would have been tiring to. In this example, we first crawl the webpage to extract. Recommended Articles. Article Contributed By :.

Easy Normal Medium Hard Expert. If you change the two instances of 33 to 34 in your browser and press Enter, you should be taken to the next trial. Unfortunately, not all websites have such readable and reliable URLs. Here we are not so much interested in what the transcript says, but what features the page has. Notice the View as XML link at the bottom that takes you to a heavily marked up version of the text which may be useful to certain types of research.

You can also look at a scan of the original document , which was transcribed to make this resource. Copy the following program into Komodo Edit and save it as open-webpage. Each browser has a different shortcut key to open the page source. If you cannot find it on your browser, try using a search engine to find where it is. See the Python library reference to learn more about urllib. These five lines of code achieve an awful lot very quickly. Let us take a moment to make sure that everything is clear and that you can recognize the building blocks that allow us to make this program do what we want it to do.

In this case, it is the trial of Benjamin Bowsey. On the following line, we call the function urlopen , which is stored in a Python module named urllib. We then saved the result of that process into a variable named response.

That variable now contains an open version of the requested website. We then use the read method, which we used earlier, to copy the contents of that open webpage into a new variable named webContent. Make sure you can pick out the variables there are 3 of them , the modules 1 , the methods 2 , and the parameters 1 before you move on.