Download file as string in python

Question

I want to download a file to python as a string. I have tried the following, but it doesn't seem to work. What am I doing wrong, or what else might I do?

from urllib import request

webFile = request.urlopen(url).read()
print(webFile)

Solution 1

The following example works.

from urllib.request import urlopen

url = 'http://winterolympicsmedals.com/medals.csv'
output = urlopen(url).read()
print(output.decode('utf-8'))

Alternatively, you could use requests which provides a more human readable syntax. Keep in mind that requests requires that you install additional dependencies, which may increase the complexity of deploying the application, depending on your production enviornment.

import requests

url = 'http://winterolympicsmedals.com/medals.csv'
output = requests.get(url).text
print(output)

Solution 2

In Python3.x, using package 'urllib' like this:

from urllib.request import urlopen

data = urlopen('http://www.google.com').read() #bytes
body = data.decode('utf-8')

Solution 3

Another good library for this is http://docs.python-requests.org

It's not built-in, but I've found it to be much more usable than urllib*.

Comments

[devoured elysium]

The topic was marked as 3.x. This doesn't seem to work in 3.x.

[eandersson]

Weird... pretty sure something changed with the question.. or maybe it worked on early versions of Python (since this is from 2013).

[ctrueden]

Both example blocks work on my macOS system with Python 3.8.2.