Question

I can download a CSV file from Google Docs with wget:

wget --no-check-certificate --output-document=locations.csv 'https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0ArM5yzzCw9IZdEdLWlpHT1FCcUpYQ2RjWmZYWmNwbXc&output=csv'

But I can’t download the same csv with Python:

import urllib2

request = urllib2.Request('https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0ArM5yzzCw9IZdEdLWlpHT1FCcUpYQ2RjWmZYWmNwbXc&output=csv')
request.add_header('User-Agent', 'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1) AppleWebKit/537.13 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/24.0.1284.0 Safari/537.13')
opener = urllib2.build_opener()
data = opener.open(request).read()
print(data)

The result is the Google login page. What am I doing wrong?

Answer 1

Just use requests, it is way better than using urllib:

import requests
response = requests.get('https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0ArM5yzzCw9IZdEdLWlpHT1FCcUpYQ2RjWmZYWmNwbXc&output=csv')
assert response.status_code == 200, 'Wrong status code'
print(response.content)

You can install it with

pip install requests