Python open direct file download url

Find centralized, trusted content and collaborate around the technologies you use most. Connect and share knowledge within a single location that is structured and easy to search. I've a lot of URL with file types. Here is what I've done for a single file I'll add them to a for loop:. Try using stream option:. Note that mydir in example above is the name of folder in current working directory. 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. I will write about methods to correctly download binaries from URLs and set their filenames. What do you think will happen if the above code is used to download it?

If you said that a HTML page will be downloaded, you are spot on. 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. Python wget library is not part of the default installation, so you can install it using the PIP package manager.

The destination file argument is optional. Sometimes we get short URLs that redirect to the actual file. The requests library get method automatically follows the redirect and download the actual file.

It will require a lot of memory and might cause out of memory error. Then we can use a for loop to read the chunks and write it into the local file.

The requests module is perfect for it. We can also specify the HTTP methods to download the file. Reference : Requests Module Official Docs.