Question

So I am trying to write a script to download a picture file with python and I found this def using google but every picture I get it to download comes out “corrupt”. Any ideas…

def download(url):
 """Copy the contents of a file from a given URL
 to a local file.
 """
 import urllib
 webFile = urllib.urlopen(url)
 localFile = open(url.split('/')[-1], 'w')
 localFile.write(webFile.read())
 webFile.close()
 localFile.close()

Edit: the code tag didn’t retain the indentions very nicely but I can assure you that they are there, that is not my problem.

Answer 1

You need to open the local file in binary mode:

localFile = open(url.split('/')[-1], 'wb')

Otherwise the CR/LF characters in the binary stream will be mangled, corrupting the file.