Python download file form url

So if the file is large, this will do nothing but waste bandwidth. I looked into the requests documentation and found a better way to do it. That way involved just fetching the headers of a url before actually downloading it. This allows us to skip downloading files which weren't meant to be downloaded. To restrict download by file size, we can get the filesize from the Content-Length header and then do suitable comparisons.

We can parse the url to get the filename. This will be give the filename in some cases correctly. However, there are times when the filename information is not present in the url. In that case, the Content-Disposition header will contain the filename information.

Here is how to fetch it. The url-parsing code in conjuction with the above method to get filename from Content-Disposition header will work for most of the cases. Use them and test the results. These are my 2 cents on downloading files using requests in Python. Let me know of other tricks I might have overlooked. This article was first posted on my personal blog.

The file will be downloaded in the same directory as the Python script. If you want to change the directory location, you can provide a complete path or relative path in the open function call. Recommended Reading : Python with Statement. If you love Linux commands and want to have similar flavor in your Python program, you can use wget library to download the file from a URL.

Python wget library is not part of the default installation, so you can install it using the PIP package manager. The destination file argument is optional. Sometimes we get short URLs that redirect to the actual file. The requests library get method automatically follows the redirect and download the actual file. It will require a lot of memory and might cause out of memory error. Stack Overflow for Teams — Collaborate and share knowledge with a private group.

Create a free Team What is Teams? Collectives on Stack Overflow. Learn more. Asked 2 years, 4 months ago. Active 1 year, 3 months ago. Viewed 25k times. Improve this question. Ivan Vinogradov 3, 6 6 gold badges 25 25 silver badges 28 28 bronze badges. Chaudhry Talha Chaudhry Talha 5, 8 8 gold badges 37 37 silver badges 83 83 bronze badges.

Please look at this answer: stackoverflow. Check this you might your answer here. I think IvanVinogradov answered your question. Proper use of os. Show 1 more comment. Active Oldest Votes. Improve this answer. Ivan Vinogradov Ivan Vinogradov 3, 6 6 gold badges 25 25 silver badges 28 28 bronze badges.