Python getting error "UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf-8' codec can't decode byte 0xad in position 10: invalid start byte" [duplicate]

Question

If I have a URL that, when submitted in a web browser, pops up a dialog box to save a zip file, how would I go about catching and downloading this zip file in Python?

Answer 1

As far as I can tell, the proper way to do this in Python 2 is:

import requests, zipfile, StringIO
r = requests.get(zip_file_url, stream=True)
z = zipfile.ZipFile(StringIO.StringIO(r.content))
z.extractall()

of course you'd want to check that the GET was successful with r.ok.

For python 3+, sub the StringIO module with the io module and use BytesIO instead of StringIO: Here are release notes that mention this change.

import requests, zipfile, io
r = requests.get(zip_file_url)
z = zipfile.ZipFile(io.BytesIO(r.content))
z.extractall("/path/to/destination_directory")