What command to use instead of urllib.request.urlretrieve?

Question

I'm currently writing a script that downloads a file from a URL

import urllib.request
urllib.request.urlretrieve(my_url, 'my_filename')

The docs urllib.request.urlretrieve state:

The following functions and classes are ported from the Python 2 module urllib (as opposed to urllib2). They might become deprecated at some point in the future.

Therefore I would like to avoid it so I don't have to rewrite this code in the near future.

I'm unable to find another interface like download(url, filename) in standard libraries. If urlretrieve is considered a legacy interface in Python 3, what is the replacement?

Solution 1

Deprecated is one thing, might become deprecated at some point in the future is another.

If it suits your needs, I'd continuing using urlretrieve.

That said, you can do without it:

from urllib.request import urlopen
from shutil import copyfileobj

with urlopen(my_url) as in_stream, open('my_filename', 'wb') as out_file:
    copyfileobj(in_stream, out_file)

Solution 2

requests is really nice for this. There are a few dependencies though to install it. Here is an example.

import requests
r = requests.get('imgurl')
with open('pic.jpg','wb') as f:
  f.write(r.content)

Solution 3

Another solution without the use of shutil and no other external libraries like requests.

import urllib.request

image_url = "https://cdn.sstatic.net/Sites/stackoverflow/img/apple-touch-icon.png"
response = urllib.request.urlopen(image_url)
image = response.read()

with open("image.png", "wb") as file:
    file.write(image)