Question

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How to download a text file or some objects from webpage using Python?

I am trying to download a file under “Pre-Release Domains” from this website: http://www.namejet.com/pages/downloads.aspx
So as today is 10th of October you want to get the file “Wednesday, October 10, 2012”.
When the click on the file the link doesn’t changes so I have trouble writing python code to download the particular file as I don’t have the specific URL of particular file. How do I write the script? I want everything to happen in the back end without actually opening the browser:

#!/usr/bin/python

from selenium import webdriver
from pyvirtualdisplay import Display
display = Display(visible=0, size=(1024, 768))
display.start()

browser=webdriver.Firefox() # Select browser that you want to automate 
browser.get('http://www.namejet.com/pages/downloads.aspx')
element=browser.find_element_by_xpath(
            '//a[@id="ctl00_ContentPlaceHolder1_hlPreRelease1"]')
element.click()
display.stop()

This code runs without error but doesn’t downloads the file. What am I doing wrong?

Answer 1

In [1]: from selenium import webdriver
In [2]: browser=webdriver.Chrome() # Select browser that you want to automate 
In [3]: browser.get('http://www.namejet.com/pages/downloads.aspx')
In [4]: element=browser.find_element_by_xpath(
            '//a[@id="ctl00_ContentPlaceHolder1_hlPreRelease1"]')

In [5]: element.click()

Now you can find prerelease_10-08-2012.txt in your download folder and you can open it in a usual way.

EDIT: note that the code downoads the latest file, that is prerelease_10-10-2012.txt as for today. Just tried it and it works fine.