Python: download a file from an FTP server

Question

I'm trying to download some public data files. I screenscrape to get the links to the files, which all look something like this:

ftp://ftp.cdc.gov/pub/Health_Statistics/NCHS/nhanes/2001-2002/L28POC_B.xpt

I can't find any documentation on the Requests library website.

Answer 1

requests library doesn't support ftp links.

To download a file from FTP server you could:

import urllib 

urllib.urlretrieve('ftp://server/path/to/file', 'file')
# if you need to pass credentials:
#   urllib.urlretrieve('ftp://username:password@server/path/to/file', 'file')

Or:

import shutil
import urllib2
from contextlib import closing

with closing(urllib2.urlopen('ftp://server/path/to/file')) as r:
    with open('file', 'wb') as f:
        shutil.copyfileobj(r, f)

Python3:

import shutil
import urllib.request as request
from contextlib import closing

with closing(request.urlopen('ftp://server/path/to/file')) as r:
    with open('file', 'wb') as f:
        shutil.copyfileobj(r, f)