How to download a file over HTTP?

Question

I have a small utility that I use to download an MP3 file from a website on a schedule and then builds/updates a podcast XML file which I've added to iTunes.

The text processing that creates/updates the XML file is written in Python. However, I use wget inside a Windows .bat file to download the actual MP3 file. I would prefer to have the entire utility written in Python.

I struggled to find a way to actually download the file in Python, thus why I resorted to using wget.

So, how do I download the file using Python?

Answer 1

One more, using urlretrieve:

import urllib urllib.urlretrieve("http://www.example.com/songs/mp3.mp3", "mp3.mp3") 

(for Python 3+ use import urllib.request and urllib.request.urlretrieve)

Yet another one, with a "progressbar"

import urllib2  url = "http://download.thinkbroadband.com/10MB.zip"  file_name = url.split('/')[-1] u = urllib2.urlopen(url) f = open(file_name, 'wb') meta = u.info() file_size = int(meta.getheaders("Content-Length")[0]) print "Downloading: %s Bytes: %s" % (file_name, file_size)  file_size_dl = 0 block_sz = 8192 while True:     buffer = u.read(block_sz)     if not buffer:         break      file_size_dl += len(buffer)     f.write(buffer)     status = r"%10d  [%3.2f%%]" % (file_size_dl, file_size_dl * 100. / file_size)     status = status + chr(8)*(len(status)+1)     print status,  f.close()