How to download a url as a file

I looked into the requests documentation and found a better way to do it. That way involved just fetching the headers of a url before actually downloading it.

This allows us to skip downloading files which weren't meant to be downloaded. To restrict download by file size, we can get the filesize from the Content-Length header and then do suitable comparisons.

We can parse the url to get the filename. This will be give the filename in some cases correctly. However, there are times when the filename information is not present in the url.

In that case, the Content-Disposition header will contain the filename information. Here is how to fetch it. The url-parsing code in conjuction with the above method to get filename from Content-Disposition header will work for most of the cases. Use them and test the results. These are my 2 cents on downloading files using requests in Python. Let me know of other tricks I might have overlooked.

This article was first posted on my personal blog. Especially if the files are big. The contents are read as bytes and copied to a file in the local directory using the FileOutputStream. To lower the number of lines of code we can use the Files class available from Java 7. The Files class contains methods that read all the bytes at once and then copies it into another file.

Here is how you can use it:. Java NIO is an alternative package to handle networking and input-output operations in Java. The main advantage that the Java NIO package offers is that it's non-blocking, and has channeling and buffering capabilities.

When we use the Java IO library we work with streams that read data byte by byte. However, the Java NIO package uses channels and buffers. The buffering and channeling capabilities allow the system to copy contents from a URL directly into the intended file without needing to save the bytes in application memory, which would be an intermediary step.

The ability to work with channels boosts performance. The downloaded contents will be transferred to a file on the local system via the corresponding file channel. After defining the file channel we will use the transferFrom method to copy the contents read from the readChannel object to the file destination using the writeChannel object.

The transferFrom and transferTo methods are much more efficient than working with streams using a buffer. The transfer methods enable us to directly copy the contents of the file system cache to the file on the system. Thus direct channeling restricts the number of context switches required and enhances the overall code performance. Now, in the following sections, we will be looking at ways to download files from a URL using third-party libraries instead of core Java functionality components.

Now you may be thinking why would we use this when Java has its own set of libraries to handle IO operations. However, Apache Commons IO overcomes the problem of code rewriting and helps avoid writing boilerplate code.

In order to start using the Apache Commons IO library, you will need to download the jar files from the official website. When you are done downloading the jar files, you need to add them to use them. If you are using an Integrated Development Environment IDE such as Eclipse , you will need to add the files to the build path of your project.

There is only a single line of code required to download a file, which looks like:. The connection and read timeouts convey the permissible time for which either the connection may stay idle or reading from the URL may stop.

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Ask Question. Asked 7 years, 8 months ago. Active 11 months ago. Viewed k times. Improve this question. Giacomo Chud37 Chud37 1 1 gold badge 5 5 silver badges 18 18 bronze badges. Can you provide the URL? Sure, I've got it now, but for testing try this: oizo You can't force your browser to download this.

The web link points to a file which contains a built in rendering system which displays the content within the page. If you own the website you can change code to do this, but from your end it would have to be a save as job. It's absolute rubbish that Chrome doesnt have this feature built in. I should just be able say right click in the url bar and click save as, but instead I have to go a stupid long winded way.

I'm still dertermined there's a solution out there. Show 1 more comment. Active Oldest Votes.