In web development, we often face the need to download resources from a webpage, such as images, files, or even the HTML source itself. Python provides an excellent library called requests that simplifies this task. In this article, we will explore how to use the requests library to download web resources.

Installing requests Library

Before we begin, make sure you have the requests library installed. If not, you can install it using the following command:

$ pip install requests

Downloading HTML Source

To download the HTML source of a webpage, we can use the get() function from the requests library. Let’s see an example:

import requests

url = "https://www.example.com"             # Replace with the desired webpage URL
response = requests.get(url)

if response.status_code == 200:             # Check if the request was successful
    html_source = response.text             # Get the HTML source code
    print(html_source)
else:
    print("Failed to retrieve HTML source.")

In the code snippet above, we make a GET request to the specified URL using requests.get(). If the request is successful (indicated by a status code of 200), we can access the HTML source code in the text attribute of the response object.

Downloading Images or Files

Downloading images or files from a webpage follows a similar approach as downloading HTML source. Here’s an example:

import requests

url = "https://www.example.com/images/logo.png"    # Replace with the desired image/file URL
response = requests.get(url)

if response.status_code == 200:
    with open("logo.png", "wb") as file:             # Save the image/file with desired name
        file.write(response.content)
    print("Download complete.")
else:
    print("Failed to download image/file.")

In the code above, we make a GET request to the specified image/file URL. If the request is successful, we use the open() function to create a file with the desired name, and then write the content of the response into it using the write() method of the file object.

Conclusion

The requests library simplifies the process of downloading web resources in Python. Whether it’s downloading HTML source or images/files, requests provides an easy-to-use interface. This article covered the basics of using requests for resource downloading. Feel free to explore the library’s documentation to discover more functionalities and advanced features.

Remember to handle exceptions and error cases, and ensure that you have the necessary permissions to download the resources from the webpages you work with. Happy resource downloading!