Welcome folks today in this tutorial we will be downloading image or pdf file from url using requests and validators libraries in python. All the full source code of the application is shown below.

Get Started

In order to get started we need to install the following libraries using the pip command as shown below

pip install requests

pip install validators

After installing these libraries make an app.py file and copy paste the following code

app.py

import sys
import requests
import re
from colorama import init, Fore, Back, Style
import validators

# PURPOSE of this script
# Get a url with various files formats to download
# For example to get a ip ranges of AWS in json format, use below url
# AWS IP range url is: https://ip-ranges.amazonaws.com/ip-ranges.json

init(autoreset=True)

# Check if user has passed the file url to download or not
if len(sys.argv) == 2:
  file_url = sys.argv[1] # Getting the url from command line# extract file name form the url using re module

  # Proceed if url is valid
  if not validators.url(file_url):
    exit(Fore.RED + Style.BRIGHT + "Not a valid url")

  # this regex would also work as it with positive lookbehind (?:[^/][\d\w\.-]+)$(?<=\.\w{3,4})
  # file name with extension
  matched_file = re.search("(?=[\w\d-]+\.\w{3,4}$).+", file_url) # regex with positive lookahead
  if matched_file is not None:
    file_name_with_extension = matched_file.group(0)
  else:
      exit(Fore.CYAN + Style.BRIGHT + "Nothing to download")
  print("Downloading %s" % file_name_with_extension)

  response = requests.get(file_url, stream = True)

  with open(file_name_with_extension, "wb") as file_download:
    total_length = response.headers.get('content-length')
    total_length = int(total_length)
    print("Total length of the file is: {0:.3f} KB".format(total_length/1024))

    dl_bar = 0 # download bar

    for chunk in response.iter_content(chunk_size = 1024): #writing one chunk at a time to file_download
      if chunk:
        dl_bar += len(chunk)
        file_download.write(chunk)
        done = int(50 * dl_bar / total_length)
        sys.stdout.write(Fore.GREEN + Style.BRIGHT + "\r[%s%s]" % ('=' * done, ' ' * (50-done)) )
        sys.stdout.flush()
  print("\nDownload Complete! \n")
else :
  print(Fore.RED + Style.BRIGHT + 'Please pass the url to download. Make sure it is downloadable url')
  print(Fore.GREEN + Style.BRIGHT + 'Ex: python {} <downloadable_url>'.format(sys.argv[0]))

Now to run this python script you need to provide an additonal command line argument in which you will be providing the url of the file to download in this script as shown below

Now to download a image from a url we will execute below command to run this script

python app.py https://freemediatools.com/img/profile.jpg

So as you can see the image is successfully downloaded with this script inside my root directory and in similar manner you can download any extension file such as pdf and any other media file like gif and video