Python in a Nutshell

Name

urlretrieve

Synopsis

urlretrieve(urlstring,filename=None,reporthook=None,data=None)

Similar to urlopen( urlstring,data ), but instead returns a pair ( f,m ). f is a string that specifies the path to a file on the local filesystem. m is an instance of class Message of module mimetools, like the result of method info called on the result value of urlopen, covered earlier in this section.

When filename is None, urlretrieve copies retrieved data to a temporary local file, and f is the path to the temporary local file. When filename is not None, urlretrieve copies retrieved data to the file named filename, and f is filename. When reporthook is not None, it must be a callable with three arguments, as in the function:

def reporthook(block_count, block_size, file_size):
    print block_count

urlretrieve calls reporthook zero or more times while retrieving data. At each call, it passes block_count, the number of blocks of data retrieved so far; block_size, the size in bytes of each block; and file_size, the total size of the file in bytes. urlretrieve passes file_size as -1 when unable to determine file size, which depends on the protocol involved and on how completely the server implements that protocol. The purpose of reporthook is to let your program give graphical or textual feedback to the user about the progress of the file retrieval operation that urlretrieve performs.