AttributeError: 'module' object has no attribute 'urlretrieve'

Question

I am trying to write a program that will download mp3's off of a website then join them together but whenever I try to download the files I get this error:

Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/home/tesla/PycharmProjects/OldSpice/Voicemail.py", line 214, in <module> main()
File "/home/tesla/PycharmProjects/OldSpice/Voicemail.py", line 209, in main getMp3s()
File "/home/tesla/PycharmProjects/OldSpice/Voicemail.py", line 134, in getMp3s
raw_mp3.add = urllib.urlretrieve("http://www-scf.usc.edu/~chiso/oldspice/m-b1-hello.mp3")
AttributeError: 'module' object has no attribute 'urlretrieve'

The line that is causing this problem is

raw_mp3.add = urllib.urlretrieve("http://www-scf.usc.edu/~chiso/oldspice/m-b1-hello.mp3")

Answer 1

As you're using Python 3, there is no urllib module anymore. It has been split into several modules.

This would be equivalent to urlretrieve:

import urllib.request
data = urllib.request.urlretrieve("http://...")

urlretrieve behaves exactly the same way as it did in Python 2.x, so it'll work just fine.

Basically:

• urlretrieve saves the file to a temporary file and returns a tuple (filename, headers)
• urlopen returns a Request object whose read method returns a bytestring containing the file contents

Answer 2

A Python 2+3 compatible solution is:

import sys

if sys.version_info[0] >= 3:
    from urllib.request import urlretrieve
else:
    # Not Python 3 - today, it is most likely to be Python 2
    # But note that this might need an update when Python 4
    # might be around one day
    from urllib import urlretrieve

# Get file from URL like this:
urlretrieve("http://www-scf.usc.edu/~chiso/oldspice/m-b1-hello.mp3")