Python for downloading a file

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. A huge number of successful applications allow users to download files. So these are just a few web application functions that require downloading files:. Using requests module is one of the most popular way to download file.

So first of all you need to install requests module, so run the following command on your terminal. Now run this program and see what happens. Now run the above code and check your download folder, you will see the file has been downloaded. And now its time to move another section of this tutorial that is how to download different types of files such as text, html, pdf, image files etc using python.

In this section, we will see how to download large files in chunks, download multiple files and download files with a progress bar.

You can also download large files in chunks. Write the following program. Now run the program, and check your download location, you will found a file has been downloaded. Now you will learn how can you download file with a progress bar.

First of all you have to install tqdm module. Now run the following command on your terminal.