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I am new to Python. Here is my environment setup:

I have Anaconda 3 ( Python 3). I would like to be able to download an CSV file from the website: https://data.baltimorecity.gov/api/views/dz54-2aru/rows.csv?accessType=DOWNLOAD

I would like to use the requests library. I would appreciate anyhelp in figuring our how I can use the requests library in downloading the CSV file to the local directory on my machine

user3049935
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1 Answers1

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It is recommended to download data as stream, and flush it into the target or intermediate local file.

import requests


def download_file(url, output_file, compressed=True):
    """
    compressed: enable response compression support
    """
    # NOTE the stream=True parameter. It enable a more optimized and buffer support for data loading.
    headers = {}
    if compressed:
        headers["Accept-Encoding"] = "gzip"

    r = requests.get(url, headers=headers, stream=True)

    with open(output_file, 'wb') as f: #open as block write.
        for chunk in r.iter_content(chunk_size=4096): 
            if chunk: # filter out keep-alive new chunks
                f.write(chunk)
        f.flush() #Afterall, force data flush into output file (optional)

    return output_file

Considering original post:

remote_csv = "https://data.baltimorecity.gov/api/views/dz54-2aru/rows.csv?accessType=DOWNLOAD"
local_output_file = "test.csv"

download_file(remote_csv, local_output_file)

#Check file content, just for test purposes:
print(open(local_output_file).read())

Base code was extracted from this post: https://stackoverflow.com/a/16696317/176765

Here, you can have more detailed information about body stream usage with requests lib:

http://docs.python-requests.org/en/latest/user/advanced/#body-content-workflow

Community
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Andre Pastore
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    Thanks here is the code I used. This might sound basic and would appreciate any changes/updates to make it better: import requests r = requests.get("https://data.baltimorecity.gov/api/views/dz54-2aru/rows.csv?accessType=DOWNLOAD") with open('test.csv', 'wb') as f: f.write(r.content) – user3049935 Oct 19 '15 at 01:14
  • Consider edited post as a general download purpose code. You can use it with any content format. – Andre Pastore Oct 19 '15 at 13:16