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python requests module download file

Narkw Brahma

Narkw Brahma

• 1 min read

Python Requests Module Download File

If you need to download files from the web, the Python requests module is an excellent choice. The requests module makes it easy to send HTTP requests and handle the responses in Python.

Using Requests Module to Download File

To download a file using the requests module, you need to do the following:

  1. Import the requests module
  2. Send an HTTP GET request to the URL where the file is located
  3. Open a file in write binary mode
  4. Write the contents of the response to the file

Here's an example of how to download a PNG image file using the requests module:


import requests

url = 'https://www.example.com/image.png'
response = requests.get(url)

with open('image.png', 'wb') as f:
    f.write(response.content)

In this example, we first import the requests module. Then, we send an HTTP GET request to the URL where the file is located using the requests.get() method. The response object contains the contents of the response from the server.

We then open a file called 'image.png' in write binary mode using the built-in open() function. We write the contents of the response to the file using the write() method of the file object.

Downloading Large Files with Streaming

If you need to download large files, it's best to use streaming to avoid loading the entire file into memory at once. To do this, you can use the requests module's iter_content() method, which returns chunks of bytes from the response.

Here's an example of how to download a large file using streaming:


import requests

url = 'https://www.example.com/largefile.zip'

response = requests.get(url, stream=True)

with open('largefile.zip', 'wb') as f:
    for chunk in response.iter_content(1024):
        f.write(chunk)

In this example, we set the 'stream' parameter to True when sending the HTTP GET request. This tells the server to send the response in chunks rather than all at once.

We then iterate over the chunks of bytes returned by the iter_content() method and write each chunk to the file using the write() method of the file object.

Conclusion

The requests module is a powerful tool for downloading files from the web. Using it, you can easily send HTTP requests and handle the responses in Python. Whether you're downloading small image files or large ZIP archives, the requests module makes it easy to get the job done.

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