I use the following code to stream large files from the Internet into a local file:
fp = open(file, 'wb')
req = urllib2.urlopen(url)
for line in req:
fp.write(line)
fp.close()
This works but it downloads quite slowly. Is there a faster way? (The files are large so I don't want to keep them in memory.)
No reason to work line by line (small chunks AND requires Python to find the line ends for you!-), just chunk it up in bigger chunks, e.g.:
# from urllib2 import urlopen # Python 2
from urllib.request import urlopen # Python 3
response = urlopen(url)
CHUNK = 16 * 1024
with open(file, 'wb') as f:
while True:
chunk = response.read(CHUNK)
if not chunk:
break
f.write(chunk)
Experiment a bit with various CHUNK sizes to find the "sweet spot" for your requirements.