Using urllib.request to write an image

Question

I am trying to use this code to download an image from the given URL

import urllib.request

resource = urllib.request.urlretrieve("http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1184/1013364004_bcf87ed140.jpg")
output = open("file01.jpg","wb")
output.write(resource)
output.close()

However, I get the following error:

TypeError                                 Traceback (most recent call last)
<ipython-input-39-43fe4522fb3b> in <module>()
     41 resource = urllib.request.urlretrieve("http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1184/1013364004_bcf87ed140.jpg")
     42 output = open("file01.jpg","wb")
---> 43 output.write(resource)
     44 output.close()

TypeError: a bytes-like object is required, not 'tuple'

I get that its the wrong data type for the .write() object but I don't know how to feed resource into output

Answer 1

Right, Using urllib.request.urlretrieve like this way:

import urllib.request

resource, headers = urllib.request.urlretrieve("http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1184/1013364004_bcf87ed140.jpg")
image_data = open(resource, "rb").read()
with open("file01.jpg", "wb") as f:
    f.write(image_data)

PS: urllib.request.urlretrieve return a tuple, the first element is the location of temp file, you could try to get the bytes of temp file, and save it to a new file.

In Official document:

The following functions and classes are ported from the Python 2 module urllib (as opposed to urllib2). They might become deprecated at some point in the future.

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So I would recommend you to use urllib.request.urlopen,try code below:

import urllib.request

resource = urllib.request.urlopen("http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1184/1013364004_bcf87ed140.jpg")
output = open("file01.jpg", "wb")
output.write(resource.read())
output.close()