Download and save PDF file with Python requests module

Question

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.

Answer 1

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.

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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.

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Relates:

• How to download large file in python with requests.py?

• How to download image using requests