Download a file to a particular folder python

I can download a file from URL the following way.

import urllib2
response = urllib2.urlopen("http://www.someurl.com/file.pdf")
html = response.read()

One way I can think of is open this file as binary and then resave it to the differnet folder I want to save

but is there a better way?

Thanks

Solution

The function you are looking for is urllib.urlretrieve

import urllib
linkToFile = "http://www.someurl.com/file.pdf"
localDestination = "/home/user/local/path/to/file.pdf"
resultFilePath, responseHeaders = urllib.urlretrieve(linkToFile, localDestination)

UPD from 2023: Although urlretrieve is still available as urllib.request.urlretrieve it is reported to be in danger of deprecations. I can't find any built-in solution with the same interface and the best solution I could offer for those who want to keep their code up-to-date is to download file with requests lib and then to dump it to file:

import requests

linkToFile = "http://www.someurl.com/best_file.pdf"
localDestination = "/home/user/path/to/file.pdf"

response = requests.get(linkToFile)

# just in case of any problem
response.raise_for_status()

with open(localDestination, 'wb') as file:
    file.write(response.content)

If you are not sure about the size of the file, you could download it in chunks:

import requests

linkToFile = "http://www.someurl.com/file.pdf"
localDestination = "/home/user/local/path/to/file.pdf"

# add streamming option for get
response = requests.get(linkToFile, stream=True)

response.raise_for_status()

#
with open(localDestination, 'wb') as file:
    # you could set an arbitrary chunk size
    for chunk in response.iter_content(chunk_size=8192):  
        file.write(chunk)

Or you could use wget as suggested in the answer below (but this lib seems to have no updates since 2015):

import wget

url = "http://someurl.com/file.pdf"
wget.download(url, '/path/to/file.pdf')