Downloading a file from url with python script

This was one of the problems I faced in the Import module of Open Event where I had to download media from certain links. When the URL linked to a webpage rather than a binary, I had to not download that file and just keep the link as is. To solve this, what I did was inspecting the headers of the URL. Headers usually contain a Content-Type parameter which tells us about the type of data the url is linking to. A naive way to do it will be -.

It works but is not the optimum way to do so as it involves downloading the file for checking the header. So if the file is large, this will do nothing but waste bandwidth.

I looked into the requests documentation and found a better way to do it. That way involved just fetching the headers of a url before actually downloading it. This allows us to skip downloading files which weren't meant to be downloaded. To restrict download by file size, we can get the filesize from the Content-Length header and then do suitable comparisons.

We can parse the url to get the filename. This will be give the filename in some cases correctly. However, there are times when the filename information is not present in the url. In that case, the Content-Disposition header will contain the filename information. Here is how to fetch it. The url-parsing code in conjuction with the above method to get filename from Content-Disposition header will work for most of the cases.

Use them and test the results. These are my 2 cents on downloading files using requests in Python. Let me know of other tricks I might have overlooked. This article was first posted on my personal blog. Especially if the files are big. That is good idea and using with as a context manager is more better and looks great. If mydir does not exist script will create it in current working directory and save file in it.

Your user must have permissions to create directories and files in current working directory. Stack Overflow for Teams — Collaborate and share knowledge with a private group. Create a free Team What is Teams? Collectives on Stack Overflow. Learn more. Asked 2 years, 4 months ago. Active 1 year, 3 months ago. Viewed 25k times. Ivan Vinogradov 3, 6 6 gold badges 25 25 silver badges 28 28 bronze badges. Chaudhry Talha Chaudhry Talha 5, 8 8 gold badges 37 37 silver badges 83 83 bronze badges. Please look at this answer: stackoverflow.

Check this you might your answer here. I think IvanVinogradov answered your question. Proper use of os. Show 1 more comment. Active Oldest Votes. Ivan Vinogradov Ivan Vinogradov 3, 6 6 gold badges 25 25 silver badges 28 28 bronze badges. So use os os.

Or add your own absolute path in your OS pathstyle of choice. This answer just shows an example of handling file downloads with requests.

Of course you should use os package to deal file file system — Ivan Vinogradov. You need to create a new folder and save the file in it? Show 4 more comments. Worth noting that urlretrieve is a legacy function from Python 2 and might be deprecated at some point.