Script to download files python

Downloading files from different online resources is one of the most important and common programming tasks to perform on the web. The importance of file downloading can be highlighted by the fact that a huge number of successful applications allow users to download files.

Here are just a few web application functions that require downloading files:. These are just a few of the applications that come to mind, but I'm sure you can think of many more. In this article we will take a look at some of the most popular ways you can download files with Python. The urllib. Specifically, the urlretrieve method of this module is what we'll use for actually retrieving the file. To use this method, you need to pass two arguments to the urlretrieve method: The first argument is the URL of the resource that you want to retrieve, and the second argument is the local file path where you want to store the downloaded file.

In the above code, we first import the urllib. Next we create a variable url that contains the path of the file to be downloaded. Keep in mind that you can pass any filename as the second parameter and that is the location and name that your file will have, assuming you have the correct permissions. Run the above script and go to your "Downloads" directory. You should see your downloaded file named "cat. Note : This urllib. Because of this, I wouldn't recommend using it in favor of one of the methods below.

We've included it here due to is popularity in Python 2. Another way to download files in Python is via the urllib2 module. The urlopen method of the urllib2 module returns an object that contains file data. To read the contents of. Note that in Python 3, urllib2 was merged in to urllib as urllib. Therefore, this script works only in Python 2.

The open method accepts two parameters, the path to the local file and the mode in which data will be written. It would have been tiring to download each video manually.

In this example, we first crawl the webpage to extract all the links and then download videos. This is a browser-independent method and much faster! One can simply scrape a web page to get all the file URLs on a webpage and hence, download all files in a single command- Implementing Web Scraping in Python with BeautifulSoup This blog is contributed by Nikhil Kumar.

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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.

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