Downloading Files From URLs With Python (Overview)

Vishal Shrestha
Downloading Files From URLs With Python Vishal Shrestha 01:49
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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.

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Sample Code (.zip)

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00:00 Welcome to this course on Downloading Files From URLs With Python. Whether you’re automating a data backup, scraping images for a dataset, or just grabbing a daily report from a server, knowing how to pull files from the web is a core skill.

00:15 In this course, we’re going to explore different tools Python provides to handle this, from built-in solutions to robust community libraries. We’ll start with an introduction on what tools Python provides for this task, then we’ll dive into urllib, the standard library module for handling URLs.

00:34 We’ll see how to use requests, which is the most popular third-party library for HTTP in Python. We’ll also cover essential techniques like saving and inspecting your content, streaming very large downloads to save memory, and finally, how to decide which method is right for your specific project.

00:53 Before we write any code, let’s talk about why Python is a great choice here. First, you have flexibility. Python handles various file types from text to binary and manages different protocols and authentication methods smoothly.

01:07 Second is portability. The code you write on macOS usually works seamlessly on Windows or Linux. Third, you have a choice of libraries, meaning you can pick a lightweight tool for a simple script or a feature-rich one for a complex application. Finally, efficiency.

01:24 Python allows you to stream large files, processing data as it arrives, rather than loading everything into memory at once.

01:32 Now that you understand why Python is a great tool for downloading files, let’s put that into practice. In the next lesson, you’ll learn about urllib, a built-in Python library that helps you to download files. It’ll help you see how file downloading works at a basic level.

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