Python progress bar and downloads

Question

I have a Python script that launches a URL that is a downloadable file. Is there some way to have Python display the download progress as oppose to launching the browser?

Answer 1

I've just written a super simple (slightly hacky) approach to this for scraping PDFs off a certain site. Note, it only works correctly on Unix based systems (Linux, mac os) as PowerShell does not handle "\r":

import sys import requests  link = "http://indy/abcde1245" file_name = "download.data" with open(file_name, "wb") as f:     print("Downloading %s" % file_name)     response = requests.get(link, stream=True)     total_length = response.headers.get('content-length')      if total_length is None: # no content length header         f.write(response.content)     else:         dl = 0         total_length = int(total_length)         for data in response.iter_content(chunk_size=4096):             dl += len(data)             f.write(data)             done = int(50 * dl / total_length)             sys.stdout.write("\r[%s%s]" % ('=' * done, ' ' * (50-done)) )                 sys.stdout.flush() 

It uses the requests library so you'll need to install that. This outputs something like the following into your console:

>Downloading download.data

>[=============                            ]

The progress bar is 52 characters wide in the script (2 characters are simply the [] so 50 characters of progress). Each = represents 2% of the download.