Question

I’m trying to download and save an image from the web using python’s requests module.

Here is the (working) code I used:

img = urllib2.urlopen(settings.STATICMAP_URL.format(**data))
with open(path, 'w') as f:
    f.write(img.read())

Here is the new (non-working) code using requests:

r = requests.get(settings.STATICMAP_URL.format(**data))
if r.status_code == 200:
    img = r.raw.read()
    with open(path, 'w') as f:
        f.write(img)

Can you help me on what attribute from the response to use from requests?

Answer 1

You can either use the response.raw file object, or iterate over the response.

To use the response.raw file-like object will not, by default, decode compressed responses (with GZIP or deflate). You can force it to decompress for you anyway by setting the decode_content attribute to True (requests sets it to False to control decoding itself). You can then use shutil.copyfileobj() to have Python stream the data to a file object:

import requests
import shutil

r = requests.get(settings.STATICMAP_URL.format(**data), stream=True)
if r.status_code == 200:
    with open(path, 'wb') as f:
        r.raw.decode_content = True
        shutil.copyfileobj(r.raw, f)        

To iterate over the response use a loop; iterating like this ensures that data is decompressed by this stage:

r = requests.get(settings.STATICMAP_URL.format(**data), stream=True)
if r.status_code == 200:
    with open(path, 'wb') as f:
        for chunk in r:
            f.write(chunk)

This’ll read the data in 128 byte chunks; if you feel another chunk size works better, use the Response.iter_content() method with a custom chunk size:

r = requests.get(settings.STATICMAP_URL.format(**data), stream=True)
if r.status_code == 200:
    with open(path, 'wb') as f:
        for chunk in r.iter_content(1024):
            f.write(chunk)

Note that you need to open the destination file in binary mode to ensure python doesn’t try and translate newlines for you. We also set stream=True so that requests doesn’t download the whole image into memory first.