Let me know of other tricks I might have overlooked. These are my 2 cents on downloading files using requests in Python.
The url-parsing code in conjuction with the above method to get filename from Content-Disposition header will work for most of the cases. In that case, the Content-Disposition header will contain the filename information.įilename = get_filename_from_cd(r.headers.get( 'content-disposition')) However, there are times when the filename information is not present in the url.Įxample, something like. This will be give the filename in some cases correctly. To extract the filename from the above URL we can write a routine which fetches the last string after backslash (/). We can parse the url to get the filename.
So using the above function, we can skip downloading urls which don't link to media. If content_length and content_length > 2e8: # 200 mb approx return False content_length = header.get( 'content-length', None) To restrict download by file size, we can get the filesize from the Content-Length header and then do suitable comparisons. Return False return True print is_downloadable( '') Return False if 'html' in content_type.lower(): H = requests.head(url, allow_redirects= True)Ĭontent_type = header.get( 'content-type') import requestsĭoes the url contain a downloadable resource This allows us to skip downloading files which weren't meant to be downloaded. That way involved just fetching the headers of a url before actually downloading it. I looked into the requests documentation and found a better way to do it. So if the file is large, this will do nothing but waste bandwidth. It works but is not the optimum way to do so as it involves downloading the file for checking the header. The high level of what you need to do is: Get the bearer token (The html of the twitter link you go to links a file called main.some random numbers.js.
You can look at the source to see exactly how to do it. Headers usually contain a Content-Type parameter which tells us about the type of data the url is linking to.Ī naive way to do it will be - r = requests.get(url, allow_redirects= True) This github repo contains a python script that will download twitter videos. To solve this, what I did was inspecting the headers of the URL. When the URL linked to a webpage rather than a binary, I had to not download that file and just keep the link as is. This was one of the problems I faced in the Import module of Open Event where I had to download media from certain links. If you said that a HTML page will be downloaded, you are spot on. What do you think will happen if the above code is used to download it ? Now let's take another example where url is. The above code will download the media at and save it as google.ico. Open( 'google.ico', 'wb').write(r.content) R = requests.get(url, allow_redirects= True) Let's start with baby steps on how to download a file using requests - import requests I will write about methods to correctly download binaries from URLs and set their filenames. I will be using the god-send library requests for it. You can read more about writing files here.This post is about how to efficiently/correctly download files from URLs using Python. The ‘w’ parameter creates the file (or overwrites if it exists). The second part stores it into a file (this file does not need to have the same filename) The first part of the code downloads the file contents into the variable data: You can save the data to disk very easily after downloading the file: import urllib2 This will request the html code from a website.
After calling this, we have the file data in a Python variable of type string. All of the file contents is received using the response.read() method call. We get a response object using the urllib2.urlopen() method, where the parameter is the link. To download a plain text file use this code: import urllib2