How do I download a file over HTTP using Python?

Question

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

The te

Answer 1

An improved version of the PabloG code for Python 2/3:

#!/usr/bin/env python
# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
from __future__ import ( division, absolute_import, print_function, unicode_literals )

import sys, os, tempfile, logging

if sys.version_info >= (3,):
    import urllib.request as urllib2
    import urllib.parse as urlparse
else:
    import urllib2
    import urlparse

def download_file(url, dest=None):
    """ 
    Download and save a file specified by url to dest directory,
    """
    u = urllib2.urlopen(url)

    scheme, netloc, path, query, fragment = urlparse.urlsplit(url)
    filename = os.path.basename(path)
    if not filename:
        filename = 'downloaded.file'
    if dest:
        filename = os.path.join(dest, filename)

    with open(filename, 'wb') as f:
        meta = u.info()
        meta_func = meta.getheaders if hasattr(meta, 'getheaders') else meta.get_all
        meta_length = meta_func("Content-Length")
        file_size = None
        if meta_length:
            file_size = int(meta_length[0])
        print("Downloading: {0} Bytes: {1}".format(url, 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 = "{0:16}".format(file_size_dl)
            if file_size:
                status += "   [{0:6.2f}%]".format(file_size_dl * 100 / file_size)
            status += chr(13)
            print(status, end="")
        print()

    return filename

if __name__ == "__main__":  # Only run if this file is called directly
    print("Testing with 10MB download")
    url = "http://download.thinkbroadband.com/10MB.zip"
    filename = download_file(url)
    print(filename)

Answer 2

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

Answer 3

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.

Answer 4

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 5

Python 3

• urllib.request.urlopen

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

• urllib.request.urlretrieve

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

  Note: According to the documentation, urllib.request.urlretrieve is a "legacy interface" and "might become deprecated in the future" (thanks gerrit)

Python 2

• urllib2.urlopen (thanks Corey)

  import urllib2
  response = urllib2.urlopen('http://www.example.com/')
  html = response.read()
  

• urllib.urlretrieve (thanks PabloG)

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

Answer 6

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.