I’ve found the requests library to offer the easiest and most versatile APIs for common HTTP-related tasks. Final Thoughtsĭownloading files with Python is super simple and can be accomplished using the standard urllib functions. Note: The wget.download function uses a combination of urllib, tempfile, and shutil to retrieve the downloaded data, save to a temporary file, and then move that file (and rename it) to the specified location. The wget Python library offers a method similar to the urllib and attracts a lot of attention to its name being identical to the Linux wget command. That’s beyond the scope of this tutorial. Note: downloaded files may require encoding in order to display properly. This is a directive aimed at web browsers that are receiving and displaying data that isn’t immediately applicable to downloading files. When a web browser loads a page (or file) it encodes it using the specified encoding from the host.Ĭommon encodings include UTF-8 and Latin-1. There are some important aspects of this approach to keep in mind-most notably the binary format of data transfer. Instead, one must manually save streamed file data as follows: import requests However, it doesn’t feature a one-liner for downloading files.
The Python requests module is a super friendly library billed as “HTTP for humans.” Offering very simplified APIs, requests lives up to its motto for even high-throughput HTTP-related demands. In other words, this is probably a safe approach for the foreseeable future. Note: urllib is considered “legacy” from Python 2 and, in the words of the Python documentation: “might become deprecated at some point in the future.” In my opinion, there’s a big divide between “might” become deprecated and “will” become deprecated. Request.urlretrieve(remote_url, local_file) Let’s consider a basic example of downloading the robots.txt file from : from urllib import request
This includes parsing, requesting, and-you guessed it-downloading files. Pythons’ urllib library offers a range of functions designed to handle common URL-related tasks. This article outlines 3 ways to download a file using python with a short discussion of each. There have been attempts to provide this in the past, but they tend to be fragile and don't provide the level of detail about problems that you get with command-line tools, so my colleagues who tried them soon went back to command-line tools.Other libraries, most notably the Python requests library, can provide a clearer API for those more concerned with higher-level operations. You may be wishing for a simple GUI download system.
It is not unusual for things to stop working until you apply the required security update (new versions of software or certificates). Security is not easy and it is a moving target trying to stay ahead of the "bad actors". This step was necessary to ensure that you are connecting to the official site and not some copycat site run by "bad actors". Note that even experienced users encountered problems when the US Gov. You do need to pay attention to the required versions of Python and the Python requests library.
The python script you can download from that page does work with Cygwin (using the Cygwin terminal with bash or zsh), native windows, or the WSL linux command-line. You should follow the instructions for Ocean Color Data ( ). The post you are using is not for oceancolor.