["python","download","ftp","python-requests"]
Python: download a file from an FTP server

I'm trying to download some public data files. I screenscrape to get the links to the files, which all look something like this: ftp://ftp.cdc.gov/pub/Health_Statistics/NCHS/nhanes/2001-2002/L28POC_B.xpt I can't find any documentation on the Requests library website.
The requests library doesn't support ftp:// links. To download a file from an FTP server you could use urlretrieve: import urllib.request urllib.request.urlretrieve('ftp://server/path/to/file', 'file') # if you need to pass credentials: # urllib.request.urlretrieve('ftp://username:password@server/path/to/file', 'file') Or urlopen: import shutil import urllib.request from contextlib import closing with closing(urllib.request.urlopen('ftp://server/path/to/file')) as r: with open('file', 'wb') as f: shutil.copyfileobj(r, f) Python 2: import shutil import urllib2 from contextlib import closing with closing(urllib2.urlopen('ftp://server/path/to/file')) as r: with open('file', 'wb') as f: shutil.copyfileobj(r, f)