downloading an excel file from the web in python

Question

I have the following web address:

dls = "http://www.muellerindustries.com/uploads/pdf/UW SPD0114.xls"

I tried to download the file:

urllib2.urlopen(dls, "test.xls")

This made a file called "test.xls" but this is clearly an html file. If I opened the html file in firefox it opened an excel file, but if I opened the file in excel it was definitely not the excel file I was looking for.

If I have a web address like the one above, how do I make python download the excel file as an excel file?

possible duplicate of [How do I download a zip file in python using urllib2?](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4028697/how-do-i-download-a-zip-file-in-python-using-urllib2) — zgyarmati, Aug 20 '14 at 23:04

score 41 · Answer 1 · edited Nov 20 '18 at 08:32

41

I suggest using requests:

import requests
dls = "http://www.muellerindustries.com/uploads/pdf/UW SPD0114.xls"
resp = requests.get(dls)

output = open('test.xls', 'wb')
output.write(resp.content)
output.close()

To get requests installed:

pip install requests

edited Nov 20 '18 at 08:32

Nathan Wailes

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answered Aug 20 '14 at 23:07

Fedalto

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score 20 · Answer 2 · answered May 14 '15 at 00:16

To add on to Fedalto's requests suggestion (+1), but make it more Pythonic with a context manager:

import requests
dls = "http://www.muellerindustries.com/uploads/pdf/UW SPD0114.xls"
resp = requests.get(dls)
with open('test.xls', 'wb') as output:
    output.write(resp.content)

score 11 · Accepted Answer · edited Sep 23 '20 at 06:30

11

This would save the excel file in the same folder that the script was ran from.

import urllib
dls = "http://www.muellerindustries.com/uploads/pdf/UW SPD0114.xls"
urllib.request.urlretrieve(dls, "test.xls")  # For Python 3
# urllib.urlretrieve(dls, "test.xls")  # For Python 2

edited Sep 23 '20 at 06:30

Sergey Shubin

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answered Aug 20 '14 at 23:12

mnjeremiah

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I used your code and got error . I solved the problem by changing to `urllib.request.urlretrieve(dls, "test.xls")` – Mohammad Nazari Nov 20 '19 at 18:54

score 5 · Answer 4 · answered Aug 20 '14 at 23:10

Two issues, one with the code (below), the other that the URL is bad. A (modern) web browser will automatically correct "http://www.muellerindustries.com/uploads/pdf/UW SPD0114.xls" to "http://www.muellerindustries.com/uploads/pdf/UW%20SPD0114.xls" but Python doesn't.

This code works for me on python 3.x

import urllib
outfilename = "test.xls"
url_of_file = "http://www.muellerindustries.com/uploads/pdf/UW%20SPD0114.xls"
urllib.request.urlretrieve(url_of_file, outfilename)

Which gets me the file.

downloading an excel file from the web in python

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