open corrupt tar file with python

I am downloading tar files from a ftp server with the help of python. However, now I am facing problems and getting the error "ReadError: unexpected end of data". I assume my file got corrupted. I can open the files outside python with the comment 'wget' inside the terminal, however I would like to only stick to python. This is my code:

os.chdir(aod_ipng)
[urlretrieve('%s%s'%(url_ipng,x),'%s'%(x)) for x in ari]

for i in range(len(ari)):
    fileName = '%s'%(ari[i])
    ind = save_ipng[i].index('IVAOT')
    h5f = save_ipng[i][ind:]
    tfile = tarfile.open(fileName,'r|')
    for t in tfile:
        if t.name == '%s'%h5f:
            f = tfile.extract(t)

ari is a string array that holds several names of tar files that needs to be downloaded.
h5f is the name of the specific h5.gz file that needs to be extracted from the tar file Let me know if you need more information regarding my code!

Solution

Reliable downloads of large files over bad connections is not easy. If http range requests are supported then you can resume the download on broken connections.

A good start is to use the requests library and read the remote file as a stream. However disconnects and resumes might still have to be handled by you.

See this question for how to use that API

But please make sure that the file is indeed a tar. You can use libmagic for file format detection.

That file extension suggests a gzip not a tar.

import gzip
f = gzip.open('h5.gz', 'rb')
file_content = f.read()
f.close()