I am trying to download a PDF file from a website and save it to disk. My attempts either fail with encoding errors or result in blank PDFs.
In [1]: import requests
In [2]: url = 'http://www.hrecos.org//images/Data/forweb/HRTVBSH.Metadata.pdf'
In [3]: response = requests.get(url)
In [4]: with open('/tmp/metadata.pdf', 'wb') as f:
...: f.write(response.text)
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
UnicodeEncodeError Traceback (most recent call last)
<ipython-input-4-4be915a4f032> in <module>()
1 with open('/tmp/metadata.pdf', 'wb') as f:
----> 2 f.write(response.text)
3
UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode characters in position 11-14: ordinal not in range(128)
In [5]: import codecs
In [6]: with codecs.open('/tmp/metadata.pdf', 'wb', encoding='utf8') as f:
...: f.write(response.text)
...:
I know it is a codec problem of some kind but I can't seem to get it to work.
You should use response.content in this case:
with open('/tmp/metadata.pdf', 'wb') as f:
f.write(response.content)
From the document:
You can also access the response body as bytes, for non-text requests:
>>> r.content
b'[{"repository":{"open_issues":0,"url":"https://github.com/...
So that means: response.text return the output as a string object, use it when you're downloading a text file. Such as HTML file, etc.
And response.content return the output as bytes object, use it when you're downloading a binary file. Such as PDF file, audio file, image, etc.
You can also use response.raw instead. However, use it when the file which you're about to download is large. Below is a basic example which you can also find in the document:
import requests
url = 'http://www.hrecos.org//images/Data/forweb/HRTVBSH.Metadata.pdf'
r = requests.get(url, stream=True)
with open('/tmp/metadata.pdf', 'wb') as fd:
for chunk in r.iter_content(chunk_size):
fd.write(chunk)
chunk_size is the chunk size which you want to use. If you set it as 2000, then requests will download that file the first 2000 bytes, write them into the file, and do this again, again and again, unless it finished.
So this can save your RAM. But I'd prefer use response.content instead in this case since your file is small. As you can see use response.raw is complex.
Relates:
How to download large file in python with requests.py?
How to download image using requests
In Python 3, I find pathlib is the easiest way to do this. Request's response.content marries up nicely with pathlib's write_bytes.
from pathlib import Path
import requests
filename = Path('metadata.pdf')
url = 'http://www.hrecos.org//images/Data/forweb/HRTVBSH.Metadata.pdf'
response = requests.get(url)
filename.write_bytes(response.content)
You can use urllib:
import urllib.request
urllib.request.urlretrieve(url, "filename.pdf")
Please note I'm a beginner. If My solution is wrong, please feel free to correct and/or let me know. I may learn something new too.
My solution:
Change the downloadPath accordingly to where you want your file to be saved. Feel free to use the absolute path too for your usage.
Save the below as downloadFile.py.
Usage: python downloadFile.py url-of-the-file-to-download new-file-name.extension
Remember to add an extension!
Example usage: python downloadFile.py http://www.google.co.uk google.html
import requests
import sys
import os
def downloadFile(url, fileName):
with open(fileName, "wb") as file:
response = requests.get(url)
file.write(response.content)
scriptPath = sys.path[0]
downloadPath = os.path.join(scriptPath, '../Downloads/')
url = sys.argv[1]
fileName = sys.argv[2]
print('path of the script: ' + scriptPath)
print('downloading file to: ' + downloadPath)
downloadFile(url, downloadPath + fileName)
print('file downloaded...')
print('exiting program...')
Generally, this should work in Python3:
import urllib.request
..
urllib.request.get(url)
Remember that urllib and urllib2 don't work properly after Python2.
If in some mysterious cases requests don't work (happened with me), you can also try using
wget.download(url)
Related:
Here's a decent explanation/solution to find and download all pdf files on a webpage:
https://medium.com/#dementorwriter/notesdownloader-use-web-scraping-to-download-all-pdfs-with-python-511ea9f55e48
regarding Kevin answer to write in a folder tmp, it should be like this:
with open('./tmp/metadata.pdf', 'wb') as f:
f.write(response.content)
he forgot . before the address and of-course your folder tmp should have been created already
Related
I am trying to download a PDF file from a website and save it to disk. My attempts either fail with encoding errors or result in blank PDFs.
In [1]: import requests
In [2]: url = 'http://www.hrecos.org//images/Data/forweb/HRTVBSH.Metadata.pdf'
In [3]: response = requests.get(url)
In [4]: with open('/tmp/metadata.pdf', 'wb') as f:
...: f.write(response.text)
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
UnicodeEncodeError Traceback (most recent call last)
<ipython-input-4-4be915a4f032> in <module>()
1 with open('/tmp/metadata.pdf', 'wb') as f:
----> 2 f.write(response.text)
3
UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode characters in position 11-14: ordinal not in range(128)
In [5]: import codecs
In [6]: with codecs.open('/tmp/metadata.pdf', 'wb', encoding='utf8') as f:
...: f.write(response.text)
...:
I know it is a codec problem of some kind but I can't seem to get it to work.
You should use response.content in this case:
with open('/tmp/metadata.pdf', 'wb') as f:
f.write(response.content)
From the document:
You can also access the response body as bytes, for non-text requests:
>>> r.content
b'[{"repository":{"open_issues":0,"url":"https://github.com/...
So that means: response.text return the output as a string object, use it when you're downloading a text file. Such as HTML file, etc.
And response.content return the output as bytes object, use it when you're downloading a binary file. Such as PDF file, audio file, image, etc.
You can also use response.raw instead. However, use it when the file which you're about to download is large. Below is a basic example which you can also find in the document:
import requests
url = 'http://www.hrecos.org//images/Data/forweb/HRTVBSH.Metadata.pdf'
r = requests.get(url, stream=True)
with open('/tmp/metadata.pdf', 'wb') as fd:
for chunk in r.iter_content(chunk_size):
fd.write(chunk)
chunk_size is the chunk size which you want to use. If you set it as 2000, then requests will download that file the first 2000 bytes, write them into the file, and do this again, again and again, unless it finished.
So this can save your RAM. But I'd prefer use response.content instead in this case since your file is small. As you can see use response.raw is complex.
Relates:
How to download large file in python with requests.py?
How to download image using requests
In Python 3, I find pathlib is the easiest way to do this. Request's response.content marries up nicely with pathlib's write_bytes.
from pathlib import Path
import requests
filename = Path('metadata.pdf')
url = 'http://www.hrecos.org//images/Data/forweb/HRTVBSH.Metadata.pdf'
response = requests.get(url)
filename.write_bytes(response.content)
You can use urllib:
import urllib.request
urllib.request.urlretrieve(url, "filename.pdf")
Please note I'm a beginner. If My solution is wrong, please feel free to correct and/or let me know. I may learn something new too.
My solution:
Change the downloadPath accordingly to where you want your file to be saved. Feel free to use the absolute path too for your usage.
Save the below as downloadFile.py.
Usage: python downloadFile.py url-of-the-file-to-download new-file-name.extension
Remember to add an extension!
Example usage: python downloadFile.py http://www.google.co.uk google.html
import requests
import sys
import os
def downloadFile(url, fileName):
with open(fileName, "wb") as file:
response = requests.get(url)
file.write(response.content)
scriptPath = sys.path[0]
downloadPath = os.path.join(scriptPath, '../Downloads/')
url = sys.argv[1]
fileName = sys.argv[2]
print('path of the script: ' + scriptPath)
print('downloading file to: ' + downloadPath)
downloadFile(url, downloadPath + fileName)
print('file downloaded...')
print('exiting program...')
Generally, this should work in Python3:
import urllib.request
..
urllib.request.get(url)
Remember that urllib and urllib2 don't work properly after Python2.
If in some mysterious cases requests don't work (happened with me), you can also try using
wget.download(url)
Related:
Here's a decent explanation/solution to find and download all pdf files on a webpage:
https://medium.com/#dementorwriter/notesdownloader-use-web-scraping-to-download-all-pdfs-with-python-511ea9f55e48
regarding Kevin answer to write in a folder tmp, it should be like this:
with open('./tmp/metadata.pdf', 'wb') as f:
f.write(response.content)
he forgot . before the address and of-course your folder tmp should have been created already
I want to download text files using python, how can I do so?
I used requests module's urlopen(url).read() but it gives me the bytes representation of file.
For me, I had to do the following (Python 3):
from urllib.request import urlopen
data = urlopen("[your url goes here]").read().decode('utf-8')
# Do what you need to do with the data.
You can use multiple options:
For the simpler solution you can use this
file_url = 'https://someurl.com/text_file.txt'
for line in urllib.request.urlopen(file_url):
print(line.decode('utf-8'))
For an API solution
file_url = 'https://someurl.com/text_file.txt'
response = requests.get(file_url)
if (response.status_code):
data = response.text
for line in enumerate(data.split('\n')):
print(line)
When downloading text files with python I like to use the wget module
import wget
remote_url = 'https://www.google.com/test.txt'
local_file = 'local_copy.txt'
wget.download(remote_url, local_file)
If that doesn't work try using urllib
from urllib import request
remote_url = 'https://www.google.com/test.txt'
file = 'copy.txt'
request.urlretrieve(remote_url, file)
When you are using the request module you are reading the file directly from the internet and it is causing you to see the text in byte format. Try to write the text to a file then view it manually by opening it on your desktop
import requests
remote_url = 'test.com/test.txt'
local_file = 'local_file.txt'
data = requests.get(remote_url)
with open(local_file, 'wb')as file:
file.write(data.content)
If I have a URL that, when submitted in a web browser, pops up a dialog box to save a zip file, how would I go about catching and downloading this zip file in Python?
As far as I can tell, the proper way to do this is:
import requests, zipfile, StringIO
r = requests.get(zip_file_url, stream=True)
z = zipfile.ZipFile(StringIO.StringIO(r.content))
z.extractall()
of course you'd want to check that the GET was successful with r.ok.
For python 3+, sub the StringIO module with the io module and use BytesIO instead of StringIO: Here are release notes that mention this change.
import requests, zipfile, io
r = requests.get(zip_file_url)
z = zipfile.ZipFile(io.BytesIO(r.content))
z.extractall("/path/to/destination_directory")
Most people recommend using requests if it is available, and the requests documentation recommends this for downloading and saving raw data from a url:
import requests
def download_url(url, save_path, chunk_size=128):
r = requests.get(url, stream=True)
with open(save_path, 'wb') as fd:
for chunk in r.iter_content(chunk_size=chunk_size):
fd.write(chunk)
Since the answer asks about downloading and saving the zip file, I haven't gone into details regarding reading the zip file. See one of the many answers below for possibilities.
If for some reason you don't have access to requests, you can use urllib.request instead. It may not be quite as robust as the above.
import urllib.request
def download_url(url, save_path):
with urllib.request.urlopen(url) as dl_file:
with open(save_path, 'wb') as out_file:
out_file.write(dl_file.read())
Finally, if you are using Python 2 still, you can use urllib2.urlopen.
from contextlib import closing
def download_url(url, save_path):
with closing(urllib2.urlopen(url)) as dl_file:
with open(save_path, 'wb') as out_file:
out_file.write(dl_file.read())
With the help of this blog post, I've got it working with just requests.
The point of the weird stream thing is so we don't need to call content
on large requests, which would require it to all be processed at once,
clogging the memory. The stream avoids this by iterating through the data
one chunk at a time.
url = 'https://www2.census.gov/geo/tiger/GENZ2017/shp/cb_2017_02_tract_500k.zip'
response = requests.get(url, stream=True)
with open('alaska.zip', "wb") as f:
for chunk in response.iter_content(chunk_size=512):
if chunk: # filter out keep-alive new chunks
f.write(chunk)
Here's what I got to work in Python 3:
import zipfile, urllib.request, shutil
url = 'http://www....myzipfile.zip'
file_name = 'myzip.zip'
with urllib.request.urlopen(url) as response, open(file_name, 'wb') as out_file:
shutil.copyfileobj(response, out_file)
with zipfile.ZipFile(file_name) as zf:
zf.extractall()
Super lightweight solution to save a .zip file to a location on disk (using Python 3.9):
import requests
url = r'https://linktofile'
output = r'C:\pathtofolder\downloaded_file.zip'
r = requests.get(url)
with open(output, 'wb') as f:
f.write(r.content)
Either use urllib2.urlopen, or you could try using the excellent Requests module and avoid urllib2 headaches:
import requests
results = requests.get('url')
#pass results.content onto secondary processing...
I came here searching how to save a .bzip2 file. Let me paste the code for others who might come looking for this.
url = "http://api.mywebsite.com"
filename = "swateek.tar.gz"
response = requests.get(url, headers=headers, auth=('myusername', 'mypassword'), timeout=50)
if response.status_code == 200:
with open(filename, 'wb') as f:
f.write(response.content)
I just wanted to save the file as is.
Thanks to #yoavram for the above solution,
my url path linked to a zipped folder, and encounter an error of BADZipfile
(file is not a zip file), and it was strange if I tried several times it
retrieve the url and unzipped it all of sudden so I amend the solution a little
bit. using the is_zipfile method as per here
r = requests.get(url, stream =True)
check = zipfile.is_zipfile(io.BytesIO(r.content))
while not check:
r = requests.get(url, stream =True)
check = zipfile.is_zipfile(io.BytesIO(r.content))
else:
z = zipfile.ZipFile(io.BytesIO(r.content))
z.extractall()
Use requests, zipfile and io python packages.
Specially BytesIO function is used to keep the unzipped file in memory rather than saving it into the drive.
import requests
from zipfile import ZipFile
from io import BytesIO
r = requests.get(zip_file_url)
z = ZipFile(BytesIO(r.content))
file = z.extract(a_file_to_extract, path_to_save)
with open(file) as f:
print(f.read())
I am trying to download file from GitHub(raw file) and then run this file as .sql file.
import snowflake.connector
from codecs import open
import logging
import requests
from os import getcwd
import os
import sys
#logging
logging.basicConfig(
filename='C:/Users/abc/Documents/Test.log',
level=logging.INFO
)
url = "https://github.com/raw/abc/master/file_name?token=Anvn3lJXDks5ciVaPwA%3D%3D"
directory = getcwd()
filename = os.path.join(getcwd(),'VIEWS.SQL')
r = requests.get(url)
filename.decode("utf-8")
f = open(filename,'w')
f.write(str(r.content))
with open(filename,'r') as theFile, open(filename,'w') as outFile:
data = theFile.read().split('\n')
data = theFile.read().replace('\n','')
data = theFile.read().replace("b'","")
data = theFile.read()
outFile.write(data)
However I get this error
syntax error line 1 at position 0 unexpected 'b'
My converted sql file has b at the beginning and bunch of newline \n characters in the file. Also the entire output file is in single quotes 'text'. Can anyone help me get rid of these? Looks like replace isn't working.
OS: Windows
Python Version: 3.7.0
You introduced a b'.. prefix by converting the response.content bytes value to a string with str():
>>> import requests
>>> r = requests.get("https://github.com/raw/abc/master/file_name?token=Anvn3lJXDks5ciVaPwA%3D%3D")
>>> r.content
b'Not Found'
>>> str(r.content)
"b'Not Found'"
Of course, the specific dummy URL you gave in your question produces a 404 Not Found response, hence the Not Found content of the response body:
>>> r.status_code
404
so the contents in this demonstration are not actually all that useful. However, even for your real URL you probably want to test for a 200 status code before moving to write the data to a file!
What is going wrong in the above is that str(bytesvalue) converts a bytes object to its representation. You'd normally want to decode a bytes value with a text codec, using the bytes.decode() method. But because you are writing the data to a file here, you should instead just open the file in binary mode and write the bytes object without decoding:
r = requests.get(url)
if r.status_code == 200:
with open(filename, 'wb') as f:
f.write(r.content)
The 'wb' mode opens the file for writing in binary mode. Writing binary content to a binary file is the most efficient; decoding it first then writing to a text file requires that it is encoded again. Better to avoid doing double work.
As a side note: there is no need to join a local filename with getcwd(); relative paths always end up in the current working directory, and otherwise it's better to use os.path.abspath(filename).
You could also trust that GitHub sets the correct character set in the Content-Type headers and have response decode the value to str for you in the form of the response.text attribute:
r = requests.get(url)
if r.status_code == 200:
with open(filename, 'w') as f:
f.write(r.text)
but again, that's really doing extra work for nothing, first decoding the binary content from the request, then encoding again when writing to a text file.
Finally, for larger file responses it is better to stream the data and copy it directly to a file. The shutil.copyfileobj() function can take a raw response fileobject directly, provided you enable transparent transport decompression:
import shutil
r = requests.get(url, stream=True)
if r.status_code == 200:
with open(filename, 'wb') as f:
# enable transparent transport decompression handling
r.raw.decode_content = True
shutil.copyfileobj(r.raw, f)
Depending on your version of Python/OS it could be as simple as changing the file to read/write in binary (and if they're still there then altering where you have the replaces):
with open(filename,'rb') as theFile, open(filename,'wb') as outFile:
outfile.write(str(r.content))
data = theFile.read().split('\n')
data = data.replace('\n','')
data = data.replace("b'","")
outFile.write(data)
It would help to have a copy of the file and the line the error is occurring on.
I'm trying to download images with shutil/urlopen because of deprecated? I'm not sure if its deprecation, but urlretrieve doesn't download the file, it just creates folder of the image name instead. After looking at other question I saw one that provides this code, but I get an error on this one too.
from urllib2 import urlopen
from shutil import copyfileobj
url = 'http://www.watchcartoononline.com/thumbs/South-Park-Season-14-Episode-11-Coon-2-Hindsight.jpg'
path = 'image.jpg'
with urlopen(url) as in_stream, open(path, 'wb') as out_file:
copyfileobj(in_stream, out_file)
output
with urlopen(url) as in_stream, open(path, 'wb') as out_file:
AttributeError: addinfourl instance has no attribute '__exit__
Try this:
import urllib
urllib.urlretrieve("http://url/img.jpg", "img.jpg")
urlopen does not implement a context manager, so you cannot use it in a with block. Here is the bug report.
You could use contextlib.closing to wrap it, although the bug report above mentions some issues with that too.
NOTE: this applies only to Python < 3.2
urlopen isn't a context manager in Python 2 (I don't know about 3). You have to manually open and close it:
in_stream = urlopen(url)
with open(path, 'wb') as out_file:
copyfileobj(in_stream, out_file)
in_stream.close()
You can also just use urllib.urlretrieve:
import urllib
urllib.urlretrieve(url, path)
It reads/writes in chunks, which lets you download large files cleanly.