Question

I’m using urllib.urlretrieve to download a file, and implementing a download progress bar using the reporthook parameter. Since urlretrieve doesn’t directly support authentication, I came up with

import urllib  def urlretrieve_with_basic_auth(url, filename=None, reporthook=None, data=None,                                 username='', password=''):     class OpenerWithAuth(urllib.FancyURLopener):         def prompt_user_passwd(self, host, realm):             return username, password      return OpenerWithAuth().retrieve(url, filename, reporthook, data) 

This works — but it seems like there might be a more direct way to do this (maybe with urllib2 or httplib2 or…) –any ideas?

Answer 1

urlgrabber has built-in support for progress bars, authentication, and more.