The shell command curl and wget can be called (using os.system or subprocess.run) to download files from internet. You can also download files using Python modules directly of course.

Comments¶

1. It is suggested that you use the requests module instead of urllib unless you want to have minimal 3rd-party dependencies.

2. You have to explicit import urllib.request in order to use it in Python 3. Please refer to https://bugs.python.org/issue36701 for more discussions. This is how Python 3 intends to work generally speaking. Of course, there are a few exceptions such as os.path