Question

This is my first Python project so it is very basic and rudimentary.
I often have to clean off viruses for friends and the free programs that I use are updated often. Instead of manually downloading each program, I was trying to create a simple way to automate the process. Since I am also trying to learn python I thought it would be a good opportunity to practice.

Questions:

I have to find the .exe file with some of the links. I can find the correct URL, but I get an error when it tries to download.

Is there a way to add all of the links into a list, and then create a function to go through the list and run the function on each url? I’ve Google’d quite a bit and I just cannot seem to make it work. Maybe I am not thinking in the right direction?

import urllib, urllib2, re, os
from BeautifulSoup import BeautifulSoup

# Website List
sas = 'http://cdn.superantispyware.com/SUPERAntiSpyware.exe'
tds = 'http://support.kaspersky.com/downloads/utils/tdsskiller.exe'
mbam = 'http://www.bleepingcomputer.com/download/malwarebytes-anti-malware/dl/7/?1'
tr = 'http://www.simplysup.com/tremover/download.html'
urllist = [sas, tr, tds, tr]
urrllist2 = []

# Find exe files to download

match = re.compile('\.exe')
data = urllib2.urlopen(urllist)
page = BeautifulSoup(data)

# Check links
#def findexe():
for link in page.findAll('a'):
    try:
        href = link['href']
        if re.search(match, href):
            urllist2.append(href)

    except KeyError:
        pass

os.chdir(r"C:\_VirusFixes")
urllib.urlretrieve(urllist2, os.path.basename(urllist2))

As you can see, I have left the function commented out as I cannot get it to work correctly.

Should I abandon the list and just download them individually? I was trying to be efficient.

Any suggestions or if you could point me in the right direction, it would be most appreciated.

Answer 1

In addition to mikez302’s answer, here’s a slightly more readable way to write your code:

import os
import re
import urllib
import urllib2

from BeautifulSoup import BeautifulSoup

websites = [
    'http://cdn.superantispyware.com/SUPERAntiSpyware.exe'
    'http://support.kaspersky.com/downloads/utils/tdsskiller.exe'
    'http://www.bleepingcomputer.com/download/malwarebytes-anti-malware/dl/7/?1'
    'http://www.simplysup.com/tremover/download.html'
]

download_links = []

for url in websites:
    connection = urllib2.urlopen(url)
    soup = BeautifulSoup(connection)
    connection.close()

    for link in soup.findAll('a', {href: re.compile(r'\.exe$')}):
        download_links.append(link['href'])

for url in download_links:
    urllib.urlretrieve(url, r'C:\_VirusFixes', os.path.basename(url))