Mike, Thanks for the pointers. I looked through the ASPN cookbook, but found a more reliable (and easier to implement) way to get the files I want. I downloaded GNU Wget from http://users.ugent.be/~bpuype/wget/( the current version is 1.10.2), and then ran it from Python as follows
import os rc = os.system('wget --debug --output-document="c:\\downloads\ \russell1000index_cyr.csv" --output-file=log.txt http://www.russell.com/common/indexes/csvs/russell1000index_cyr.csv') rc is the return code, and is 0 if the download succeeds. I also tried the subprocess module import subprocess f = subprocess.Popen('wget --debug --output-document="c:\\downloads\ \russell1000index_cyr.csv" --output-file=log.txt http://www.russell.com/common/indexes/csvs/russell1000index_cyr.csv') This, too, works just fine. Wget does a lot more error-checking than the recipe in the Python cookbook, does FTP as well as http, and supports OpenSSL - its essentially a one-stop solution. In addition, I can write batch files that do all the downloads without any need for Python to be installed on the machine. Thanks again Thomas Philips -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list