Using WWW:Mechanize to download a file to disk without loading it all in memory first

ruby mechanize
Thomas picture Thomas · Dec 5, 2010 · Viewed 14.3k times · Source

I'm using Mechanize to facilitate the downloading of some files. At the moment my script uses the following line to actually download the files...

agent.get('http://example.com/foo').save_as 'a_file_name'

However this downloads the complete file into memory before dumping it to disk. How do you bypass this behavior, and simply download straight to disk? If I need to use something other than WWW:Mechanize then how would I go about using WWW:Mechanize's cookies with it?

Answer

Renato picture Renato · Feb 2, 2012

What you really want is the Mechanize::Download

http://mechanize.rubyforge.org/Mechanize/Download.html

you can use this way:

require 'mechanize'

agent = Mechanize.new
agent.pluggable_parser.default = Mechanize::Download
agent.get('http://example.com/foo').save('a_file_name')

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