python download file from url

The urllib2 module can be used to download data from the web (network resource access). This data can be a file, a website or whatever you want Python to download. The module supports HTTP, HTTPS, FTP and several other protocols.

In this article you will learn how to download data from the web using Python.

Related course

• Browser Automation with Python Selenium

Download text

To download a plain text file use this code:

import urllib2
response = urllib2.urlopen('https://wordpress.org/plugins/about/readme.txt')
data = response.read()
print(data)

We get a response object using the urllib2.urlopen() method, where the parameter is the link. All of the file contents is received using the response.read() method call. After calling this, we have the file data in a Python variable of type string.

Download HTML

This will request the html code from a website. It will output everything to the screen.

import urllib2
response = urllib2.urlopen('https://en.wikipedia.org/')
html = response.read()
print html

Download file using Python

You can save the data to disk very easily after downloading the file:

import urllib2
response = urllib2.urlopen('https://wordpress.org/plugins/about/readme.txt')
data = response.read()

# Write data to file
filename = "test.txt"
file_ = open(filename, 'w')
file_.write(data)
file_.close()

The first part of the code downloads the file contents into the variable data:

import urllib2
response = urllib2.urlopen('https://wordpress.org/plugins/about/readme.txt')
data = response.read()

The second part stores it into a file (this file does not need to have the same filename)

# Write data to file
filename = "test.txt"
file_ = open(filename, 'w')
file_.write(data)
file_.close()

The ‘w’ parameter creates the file (or overwrites if it exists). You can read more about writing files here.

Related course

• Browser Automation with Python Selenium

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