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

urlretrieve and requests.get are simple, however the reality not. I have fetched data for couple sites, including text and images, the above two probably solve most of the tasks. but for a more universal solution I suggest the use of urlopen. As it is included in Python 3 standard library, your code could run on any machine that run Python 3 without pre-installing site-package

import urllib.request
url_request = urllib.request.Request(url, headers=headers)
url_connect = urllib.request.urlopen(url_request)

#remember to open file in bytes mode
with open(filename, 'wb') as f:
    while True:
        buffer = url_connect.read(buffer_size)
        if not buffer: break

        #an integer value of size of written data
        data_wrote = f.write(buffer)

#you could probably use with-open-as manner
url_connect.close()

This answer provides a solution to HTTP 403 Forbidden when downloading file over http using Python. I have tried only requests and urllib modules, the other module may provide something better, but this is the one I used to solve most of the problems.