Downloading Files From URLs With Python

Python makes it straightforward to download files from a URL with its robust set of libraries. For quick tasks, you can use the built-in urllib module or the requests library to fetch and save files. When working with large files, streaming data in chunks can help save memory and improve performance.

You can also perform parallel file downloads using ThreadPoolExecutor for multithreading or the aiohttp library for asynchronous tasks. These approaches allow you to handle multiple downloads concurrently, significantly reducing the total download time if you’re handling many files.

By the end of this video course, you’ll understand that:

• You can use Python to download files with libraries like urllib and requests.
• To download a file using a URL in Python, you can use urlretrieve() or requests.get().
• To extract data from a URL in Python, you use the response object from requests.
• To download a CSV file from a URL in Python, you may need to specify the format in the URL or query parameters.

In this video course, you’ll be downloading a range of economic data from the World Bank Open Data platform.

What’s Included:

• 17 Lessons
• Video Subtitles and Full Transcripts
• 2 Downloadable Resources
• Accompanying Text-Based Tutorial
• 3 Hands-On Coding Exercises
• Q&A With Python Experts: Ask a Question
• Certificate of Completion

Downloadable Resources:

• Course Slides (.pdf)
• Sample Code (.zip)

Related Learning Paths:

• Files and File Streams