TypeError: write() argument must be str, not bytes Your primary scraping or analysis script then references the local file. The nicer and Pythonic thing to do is to have a separate script that does the request once and saves the required data to a local file.

This generates unnecessary traffic and load on that server which is a pretty crappy thing to do! In the case of our code challenge (PCC17), how many times are you going to run your Py script while building the app to test if it works? Every time you run that script with your requests.get code in place, you’re making a call to the target web server. Good question! It’s about best practice and just being nice. Why Download when you can just Parse the feed itself? For those of you playing at home, this is for our PyBites Code Challenge 17 (hint hint!). I’m talking XML here because I was/am trying to download the actual XML file for an RSS feed I wanted to parse offline. I wasn’t dealing with a text = r.text situation anymore, I was trying to maintain the original format of the page as well, tabs and all.

You’re no longer just reading a text rendered version of the page, you’re trying to save the actual page in its original state. What if you wanted to actually save that web page to your local drive? Things get slightly different. Generally it’s for the purpose of parsing or scraping that page for specific data elements.

Parsing is Different to Savingįor sure, experts and beginners alike will have used requests to pull down the contents of a web page. At least, it wasn’t as straight forward as that for a beginner like me. Really? An article on downloading and saving an XML file? “Just use requests mate!”, I hear you all saying.

Requests python download file