urllib.urlretrieve() downloads invalid images when filename has two periods in it

Question

This is silly. Every time I try to download a group of images that have periods in the file name the images show as "invalid" after being downloaded and don't open properly on my machine. Never encountered this problem before. What gives? How do I work around this?

image_url = "http://somewebsite.com/images/icon.50.png"
urllib.urlretrieve(image_url, "icon.png")

enter image description here

Are you sure it's a problem with urllib? The image you posted seems like an actual image, just not the image you expected? — André Laszlo, Jul 02 '15 at 15:40
I suspect that the server operators have implemented checks to make it difficult for others to hotlink their images. — Anthony Geoghegan, Jul 02 '15 at 16:03
I can confirm it works just fine locally so it can't be an issue with urllib. — stevieb, Jul 02 '15 at 16:43
I don't know what the issue is but using requests instead of urllib.urlretrieve worked: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/16694907/how-to-download-large-file-in-python-with-requests-py — user1645914, Jul 02 '15 at 16:48
I would still like to know why it didn't work with urllib.urlretrieve? — user1645914, Jul 02 '15 at 16:49

score 0 · Answer 1 · answered Sep 12 '15 at 14:36

Maybe the file is large enough...

Try this

def download_file(url):
local_filename = url.split('/')[-1]
# NOTE the stream=True parameter
r = requests.get(url, stream=True)
with open(local_filename, 'wb') as f:
    for chunk in r.iter_content(chunk_size=1024): 
        if chunk: # filter out keep-alive new chunks
            f.write(chunk)
            f.flush()
return local_filename

urllib.urlretrieve() downloads invalid images when filename has two periods in it

1 Answers1