How to get filename from Content-Disposition in headers

Question

I am downloading a file with Mechanize and in response headers there is a string:

Content-Disposition: attachment; filename=myfilename.txt

Is there a quick standard way to get that filename value? What I have in mind now is this:

filename = f[1]['Content-Disposition'].split('; ')[1].replace('filename=', '')

But it looks like a quick'n'dirty solution.

Answer 1

First get the value of the header by using mechanize, then parse the header using the builtin cgi module.

To demonstrate:

>>> import mechanize
>>> browser = mechanize.Browser()
>>> response = browser.open('http://example.com/your/url')
>>> info = response.info()
>>> header = info.getheader('Content-Disposition')
>>> header
'attachment; filename=myfilename.txt'

The header value can then be parsed:

>>> import cgi               
>>> value, params = cgi.parse_header(header)
>>> value
'attachment'
>>> params
{'filename': 'myfilename.txt'}

params is a simple dict so params['filename'] is what you need. It doesn't matter whether the filename is wrapped in quotes or not.