Python download all files from internet address?

Question

I want to download all files from an internet page, actually all the image files. I found the 'urllib' module to be what I need. There seems to be a method to download a file, if you know the filename, but I don't.

urllib.urlretrieve('http://www.example.com/page', 'myfile.jpg')

Is there a method to download all the files from the page and maybe return a list?

Answer 1

Here's a little example to get you started with using BeautifulSoup for this kind of exercise - you give this script a URL, and it will print out the URLs of images that are referenced from that page in the src attribute of img tags that end with jpg or png:

import sys, urllib, re, urlparse
from BeautifulSoup import BeautifulSoup

if not len(sys.argv) == 2:
    print >> sys.stderr, "Usage: %s <URL>" % (sys.argv[0],)
    sys.exit(1)

url = sys.argv[1]

f = urllib.urlopen(url)
soup = BeautifulSoup(f)
for i in soup.findAll('img', attrs={'src': re.compile('(?i)(jpg|png)$')}):
    full_url = urlparse.urljoin(url, i['src'])
    print "image URL: ", full_url

Then you can use urllib.urlretrieve to download each of the images pointed to by full_url, but at that stage you have to decide how to name them and what to do with the downloaded images, which isn't specified in your question.