Practical Programming, 2nd Edition

Files over the Internet

These days, of course, the file containing the data we want could be on a machine half a world away. Provided the file is accessible over the Internet, though, we can read it just as we do a local file. For example, the Hopedale data not only exists on our computers, but it’s also on a web page. At the time of writing, the URL for the file is http://robjhyndman.com/tsdldata/ecology1/hopedale.dat (you can look at it online!).

(Note that the examples in this section will work only if your computer is actually connected to the Internet.)

Module urllib.request contains a function called urlopen that opens a web page for reading. urlopen returns a file-like object that you can use much as if you were reading a local file. ...