swarna pulavarty wrote: > Hi all, > > I am new to this Python group and to Python . I need to retrieve data > from an arbitrary URL and save it to a file. > Can anyone tell me how to retrieve "any" data using FTP modules in > Python ? And also, Can you suggest me some books and online references > to get familiar with Python and especially FTP modules in Python ? > > Your help is appreciated ! > Swana:
If you need to handle arbitrary URLs then you need either urllib or urllib2, both components of the standard library. See http://docs.python.org/lib/module-urllib.html and http://docs.python.org/lib/module-urllib2.html I don't use urllib2 much myself, so here's an example from urllib. How much easier can this be? $ python Python 2.4.1 (#1, May 27 2005, 18:02:40) [GCC 3.3.3 (cygwin special)] on cygwin Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information. >>> import urllib >>> f = urllib.urlopen("http://www.holdenweb.com/") >>> dir(f) ['__doc__', '__init__', '__iter__', '__module__', '__repr__', 'close', 'fileno', 'fp', 'geturl', 'headers', 'info', 'next', 'read', 'readline', 'readlines', 'ur l'] >>> print f.read() <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"> <html> <head> ... </div> </body> </html> >>> f.headers.keys() ['content-length', 'accept-ranges', 'server', 'last-modified', 'connection', 'etag', 'date', 'content-type'] >>> f.headers["content-length"] '13378' >>> Good luck! regards Steve -- Steve Holden +44 150 684 7255 +1 800 494 3119 Holden Web LLC http://www.holdenweb.com/ -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list