How do I download a tarball with python?

Question

I'm trying to download a tarball by downloading the contents and then writing them to a file. This is basically how my code works:

from urllib import urlretrieve

contents = urlretrieve('http://example.com/file.tgz')
open('/tmp/my-tar.tgz', 'w').write(contents)

However, when I do that, I get an error (a TypeError) that says 'expected a character buffer object' in the call to write.

How would I write the contents of a tarball to a file?

What happens if you open `/tmp/my-tar.tgz` in mode `wb` instead of `w`? — MattDMo, Aug 22 '14 at 17:58
Doesn't [urlretrieve](https://docs.python.org/2/library/urllib.html#urllib.urlretrieve) return a tuple `(filename, headers)`?... — cubuspl42, Aug 22 '14 at 18:02
Actually, this question is a duplicate of http://stackoverflow.com/questions/22676/how-do-i-download-a-file-over-http-using-python. — cubuspl42, Aug 22 '14 at 18:07

score 4 · Accepted Answer · answered Aug 22 '14 at 18:02

From the docs:

urllib.urlretrieve(url[, filename[, reporthook[, data]]])

Copy a network object denoted by a URL to a local file, if necessary. If the URL points to a local file, or a valid cached copy of the object exists, the object is not copied. Return a tuple (filename, headers) where filename is the local file name under which the object can be found, and headers is whatever the info() method of the object returned by urlopen() returned (for a remote object, possibly cached). Exceptions are the same as for urlopen().

write is complaining because it expects to get the contents of what you're trying to write, but it's actually getting a (filename, headers) tuple.

Fixed version:

from urllib import urlretrieve

filename, headers = urlretrieve('http://example.com/file.tgz', '/tmp/my-tar.tgz')

`contents` is the name of a `(filename, headers)` tuple? Isn't that misleading? — cubuspl42, Aug 22 '14 at 18:04

How do I download a tarball with python?

1 Answers1