Guillaume Redoulès

Downloading a static webpage with python

  2. Python
  3. Web Scraping

If you are using python legacy (aka python 2) first of all, stop ! Furthermore, this method won't work in python legacy

# Import modules
from urllib.request import urlopen

The webpage source code can be downloaded with the command urlopen

url = "http://example.com/"
#create a HTTP request in order to read the page
page = urlopen(url).read()

The source code will be stored in the variable page as a string 

print(page)

b'<!doctype html>\n<html>\n<head>\n    <title>Example Domain</title>\n\n    <meta charset="utf-8" />\n    <meta http-equiv="Content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />\n    <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1" />\n    <style type="text/css">\n    body {\n        background-color: #f0f0f2;\n        margin: 0;\n        padding: 0;\n        font-family: "Open Sans", "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif;\n        \n    }\n    div {\n        width: 600px;\n        margin: 5em auto;\n        padding: 50px;\n        background-color: #fff;\n        border-radius: 1em;\n    }\n    a:link, a:visited {\n        color: #38488f;\n        text-decoration: none;\n    }\n    @media (max-width: 700px) {\n        body {\n            background-color: #fff;\n        }\n        div {\n            width: auto;\n            margin: 0 auto;\n            border-radius: 0;\n            padding: 1em;\n        }\n    }\n    </style>    \n</head>\n\n<body>\n<div>\n    <h1>Example Domain</h1>\n    <p>This domain is established to be used for illustrative examples in documents. You may use this\n    domain in examples without prior coordination or asking for permission.</p>\n    <p><a href="http://www.iana.org/domains/example">More information...</a></p>\n</div>\n</body>\n</html>\n'

Additionally, you can beautifulsoup in order to make it easier to work with html

from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
soup = BeautifulSoup(page, 'lxml')
soup.prettify()
print(soup)

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<title>Example Domain</title>
<meta charset="utf-8"/>
<meta content="text/html; charset=utf-8" http-equiv="Content-type"/>
<meta content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1" name="viewport"/>
<style type="text/css">
    body {
        background-color: #f0f0f2;
        margin: 0;
        padding: 0;
        font-family: "Open Sans", "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif;

    }
    div {
        width: 600px;
        margin: 5em auto;
        padding: 50px;
        background-color: #fff;
        border-radius: 1em;
    }
    a:link, a:visited {
        color: #38488f;
        text-decoration: none;
    }
    @media (max-width: 700px) {
        body {
            background-color: #fff;
        }
        div {
            width: auto;
            margin: 0 auto;
            border-radius: 0;
            padding: 1em;
        }
    }
    </style>
</head>
<body>
<div>
<h1>Example Domain</h1>
<p>This domain is established to be used for illustrative examples in documents. You may use this
    domain in examples without prior coordination or asking for permission.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.iana.org/domains/example">More information...</a></p>
</div>
</body>
</html>