python requests library download file

Python Requests Library Download File

If you're working with Python, you're probably writing code to interact with the internet. This means you'll likely want to download files from various websites. Luckily, Python has a library called Requests that makes this process incredibly easy.

Using the Requests Library

The first step in using the Requests library is to install it. You can do this using pip, which is a package manager for Python. To install Requests, simply run the following command:

pip install requests

Once you have Requests installed, you can use it to download files from the internet. The basic code for doing this looks like this:

import requests
    
url = 'https://www.example.com/file.pdf'
r = requests.get(url)
    
with open('myfile.pdf', 'wb') as f:
    f.write(r.content)

In this code, we're first importing the Requests library. We then define the URL of the file we want to download and use the get() method provided by Requests to retrieve the file. We then open a file in write-binary mode and write the contents of the file to that file using the write() method.

This code will download a file from a URL and save it to your local machine with the name "myfile.pdf".

Using urllib

If you don't want to use the Requests library, you can also download files using Python's built-in urllib library. Here's an example:

import urllib.request
    
url = 'https://www.example.com/file.pdf'
urllib.request.urlretrieve(url, 'myfile.pdf')

Here, we're importing the urllib library and using its urlretrieve() method to download the file from a URL and save it to a local file called "myfile.pdf".

Conclusion

Downloading files from the internet is a common task in Python, and both the Requests and urllib libraries provide simple ways to accomplish this. Whether you choose to use Requests or urllib will likely depend on your personal preferences and the specific needs of your project.