

This tells the program that the file will be downloaded in several smaller parts as opposed to in one go. Here is the code:Īs you see, in the GET request we should set the stream parameter to ‘True’. To illustrate this point, we can try to download a sample video file provided by the website. Luckily, Python 'requests' package does provide a solution to this dilemma. The RAM is usually not designed for this purpose and this can really slow down the process for bigger files and potentially overflow and crash. The main issue with this is that the file is first stored entirely in the RAM before being transferred to the Hard Drive. Well, the more eagle-eyed may have noticed that we first received the whole file through the GET request and then we went through its entirety to write it on the hard disk. So, what’s the problem with this method of downloading files? It automatically calls the close method at the end. To ensure that the file is always closed, no matter what we do with it, we can use the ‘ with’ statement as shown below. There’s one last trick about dealing with files. This has now exported the downloaded contents of the Wiki image to a local file. This is important for the proper execution of programs and saving of the file. Next, to write to the file, we simply pass the response content to the write method.įinally, we should close the file at the end. Now you understand what the first line does – it creates a JPG file for writing in binary.

It is one of the most popular Python packages for this purpose. Instead, you can use the simple interface of the ‘requests’ module.

That is to say that you as a user, don’t need to know exactly how HTTP requests work. It is a user-friendly implementation of the HTTP request abstract concept.
#Python download html5 video how to#
In this tutorial, we will discuss one of these methods – we will show you how to programmatically download files from the web with the help of the Python ‘ requests’ library.īut let’s begin with a couple of words about the ‘requests’ package. Lucky for data science professionals, there are many ways to obtain useful data – through a company’s internal data collection mechanisms, by taking advantage of APIs or just by downloading a relevant file from the web. Data collection is an integral step of every company’s data analysis pipeline.
