Question

I have a URL say www.someurl.com/blah.xml.

I want to write a python script that goes to that URL, gets its contents, and saves it to a file on the local hard disk. Not sure what the best way of going about this or if any recommended libraries are necessary for this kind of thing.

Answer 1

Something like this:

import urllib2 as urllib

page = urllib.urlopen('http://www.someurl.com/blah.xml')
with open('output.xml', 'w') as f:
  f.write(page.read())

Then you could maybe make a cron job to run every five minutes. At the terminal, type crontab -e and make a line that says:

*/5 * * * * python path/to/script.py

I’m not an expert with crontabs, so someone correct that if I’m wrong.