Most people recommend using requests
if it is available, and the requests
documentation recommends this for downloading and saving raw data from a url:
import requests def download_url(url, save_path, chunk_size=128): r = requests.get(url, stream=True) with open(save_path, 'wb') as fd: for chunk in r.iter_content(chunk_size=chunk_size): fd.write(chunk)
Since the answer asks about downloading and saving the zip file, I haven’t gone into details regarding reading the zip file. See one of the many answers below for possibilities.
If for some reason you don’t have access to requests
, you can use urllib.request
instead. It may not be quite as robust as the above.
import urllib.request def download_url(url, save_path): with urllib.request.urlopen(url) as dl_file: with open(save_path, 'wb') as out_file: out_file.write(dl_file.read())
Finally, if you are using Python 2 still, you can use urllib2.urlopen
.
from contextlib import closing def download_url(url, save_path): with closing(urllib2.urlopen(url)) as dl_file: with open(save_path, 'wb') as out_file: out_file.write(dl_file.read())