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python requests write to file

Narkw Brahma

Narkw Brahma

• 1 min read

How to Use Python Requests to Write to a File

If you're working with Python and the requests library, you may need to write the data you receive from an API or website to a file on your computer. This can be useful for data analysis or for simply storing the data for later use. Here's how you can use Python requests to write to a file.

Step 1: Import the Requests Library

Before you can use the requests library, you need to make sure it's installed on your computer. You can do this by running the following command in your terminal:

!pip install requests

Once you have the library installed, import it into your Python script:

import requests

Step 2: Send a Request and Retrieve the Data

The next step is to send a request to the API or website and retrieve the data. Here's an example of how you can do this:

response = requests.get('https://jsonplaceholder.typicode.com/posts')

In this example, we're sending a GET request to the JSONPlaceholder API to retrieve a list of posts.

Step 3: Write the Data to a File

Now that we have the data, we need to write it to a file. Here's how you can do this:

with open('posts.txt', 'w') as f:
       f.write(response.text)

In this example, we're opening a file named 'posts.txt' in write mode and using the write() method to write the response text to the file.

Step 4: Close the File

Once you're done writing to the file, make sure to close it:

f.close()

Alternatively, you can use a with statement like we did in Step 3. This will automatically close the file when you're done writing to it.

Alternative Methods

There are a few alternative ways you can write to a file with Python requests.

  • You can use the shutil library to copy the response content directly to a file:
import shutil
shutil.copyfileobj(response.raw, f)
  • You can use the os library to open the file in binary mode and write the response content:
import os
with open('posts.txt', 'wb') as f:
    f.write(response.content)
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