Download a .csv file with Python

Question

I am using Python 3.3 on Windows. I am trying to figure out how to download a .csv file from yahoo finance. It is a file for the Historical Prices.

This is the sour

Answer 1

You can do this with just urllib. The following code downloads the .csv file and puts the contents into a string named 'csv'. Then it saves the string to a file:

from urllib import request

# Retrieve the webpage as a string
response = request.urlopen("http://ichart.finance.yahoo.com/table.csv?s=AAPL&d=1&e=1&f=2014&g=d&a=8&b=7&c=1984&ignore=.csv")
csv = response.read()

# Save the string to a file
csvstr = str(csv).strip("b'")

lines = csvstr.split("\\n")
f = open("historical.csv", "w")
for line in lines:
   f.write(line + "\n")
f.close()

Answer 2

since you already use BeautifulSoup and urllib:

url = BeautifulSoup(html).find('a')['href']
urllib.urlretrieve(url, '/path/to/downloads/file.csv')