Download all pdf files from a website using Python

Question

I have followed several online guides in an attempt to build a script that can identify and download all pdfs from a website to save me from doing it manually. Here is my code so far:

from urllib import request
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
import re
import os
import urllib

# connect to website and get list of all pdfs
url="http://www.gatsby.ucl.ac.uk/teaching/courses/ml1-2016.html"
response = request.urlopen(url).read()
soup= BeautifulSoup(response, "html.parser")     
links = soup.find_all('a', href=re.compile(r'(.pdf)'))


# clean the pdf link names
url_list = []
for el in links:
    url_list.append(("http://www.gatsby.ucl.ac.uk/teaching/courses/" + el['href']))
#print(url_list)


# download the pdfs to a specified location
for url in url_list:
    print(url)
    fullfilename = os.path.join('E:\webscraping', url.replace("http://www.gatsby.ucl.ac.uk/teaching/courses/ml1-2016/", "").replace(".pdf",""))
    print(fullfilename)
    request.urlretrieve(url, fullfilename)

The code can appear to find all the pdfs (uncomment the print(url_list) to see this). However, it fails at the download stage. In particular I get this error and I am not able to understand what's gone wrong:

E:\webscraping>python get_pdfs.py
http://www.gatsby.ucl.ac.uk/teaching/courses/http://www.gatsby.ucl.ac.uk/teaching/courses/ml1-2016/cribsheet.pdf
E:\webscraping\http://www.gatsby.ucl.ac.uk/teaching/courses/cribsheet
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "get_pdfs.py", line 26, in <module>
    request.urlretrieve(url, fullfilename)
  File "C:\Users\User\Anaconda3\envs\snake\lib\urllib\request.py", line 248, in urlretrieve
    with contextlib.closing(urlopen(url, data)) as fp:
  File "C:\Users\User\Anaconda3\envs\snake\lib\urllib\request.py", line 223, in urlopen
    return opener.open(url, data, timeout)
  File "C:\Users\User\Anaconda3\envs\snake\lib\urllib\request.py", line 532, in open
    response = meth(req, response)
  File "C:\Users\User\Anaconda3\envs\snake\lib\urllib\request.py", line 642, in http_response
    'http', request, response, code, msg, hdrs)
  File "C:\Users\User\Anaconda3\envs\snake\lib\urllib\request.py", line 570, in error
    return self._call_chain(*args)
  File "C:\Users\User\Anaconda3\envs\snake\lib\urllib\request.py", line 504, in _call_chain
    result = func(*args)
  File "C:\Users\User\Anaconda3\envs\snake\lib\urllib\request.py", line 650, in http_error_default
    raise HTTPError(req.full_url, code, msg, hdrs, fp)
urllib.error.HTTPError: HTTP Error 404: Not Found

Can somebody help me please?

Answer 1

Check out the following implementation. I've used requests module instead of urllib to do the download. Moreover, I've used .select() method instead of .find_all() to avoid using re.

import os
import requests
from urllib.parse import urljoin
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup

url = "http://www.gatsby.ucl.ac.uk/teaching/courses/ml1-2016.html"

#If there is no such folder, the script will create one automatically
folder_location = r'E:\webscraping'
if not os.path.exists(folder_location):os.mkdir(folder_location)

response = requests.get(url)
soup= BeautifulSoup(response.text, "html.parser")     
for link in soup.select("a[href$='.pdf']"):
    #Name the pdf files using the last portion of each link which are unique in this case
    filename = os.path.join(folder_location,link['href'].split('/')[-1])
    with open(filename, 'wb') as f:
        f.write(requests.get(urljoin(url,link['href'])).content)