Basic http file downloading and saving to disk in python?

A clean way to download a file is:

import urllib

testfile = urllib.URLopener()
testfile.retrieve("http://randomsite.com/file.gz", "file.gz")

This downloads a file from a website and names it file.gz. This is one of my favorite solutions, from Downloading a picture via urllib and python.

This example uses the urllib library, and it will directly retrieve the file form a source.

For Python3+ URLopener is deprecated. And when used you will get error as below:

url_opener = urllib.URLopener() AttributeError: module 'urllib' has no attribute 'URLopener'

So, try:

import urllib.request 
urllib.request.urlretrieve(url, filename)

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