What's the simplest to way to retrieve a file over HTTP using Python?

Question

What's the most efficient way of fetching a file from a URL using Python?

Answer 1

Asked before. Here

Answer 2

import urllib

def fetchUrl(url):
    res = urllib.urlopen(url)
    page = res.read()
    res.close()
    return page

Answer 3

Check module urllib2.
If you want to fetch a file via http, you can in simplest option, just use;

from urllib2 import urlopen
f = urlopen("http://some.server/some/directory/some.file")

Then the f object is a file-like object, i.e. it has a .read method you can use to get your file content.