Downloading media content from the web

Downloading media content from the web is a simple process: use Requests or another library and download it just like you would HTML content.

Getting ready

There is a class named URLUtility in the urls.py mdoule in the util folder of the solution.  This class handles several of the scenarios in this chapter with downloading and parsing URLs. We will be using this class in this recipe and a few others. Make sure the modules folder is in your Python path.  Also, the example for this recipe is in the 04/01_download_image.py file. 

How to do it

Here is how we proceed with the recipe:

1. The URLUtility class can download content from a URL.  The code in the recipe's file is the following:

import const
from util.urls import URLUtility

util = URLUtility(const.ApodEclipseImage())
print(len(util.data))

2. When running this you will see the following output:

Reading URL: https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/image/1709/BT5643s.jpg
Read 171014 bytes
171014

The example reads 171014 bytes...