Stream large binary files with urllib2 to file

Question

I use the following code to stream large files from the Internet into a local file:

fp = open(file, 'wb')
req = urllib2.urlopen(url)
for line in req:
    fp.write(line)
fp.close()

This works but it downloads quite slowly. Is there a faster way? (The files are large so I don't want to keep them in memory.)

Answer 1

No reason to work line by line (small chunks AND requires Python to find the line ends for you!-), just chunk it up in bigger chunks, e.g.:

# from urllib2 import urlopen # Python 2
from urllib.request import urlopen # Python 3

response = urlopen(url)
CHUNK = 16 * 1024
with open(file, 'wb') as f:
    while True:
        chunk = response.read(CHUNK)
        if not chunk:
            break
        f.write(chunk)

Experiment a bit with various CHUNK sizes to find the "sweet spot" for your requirements.