urllib - Get size of a file before downloading in Python

Question

I'm downloading an entire directory from a web server. It works OK, but I can't figure how to get the file size before download to compare if it was updated on the server or not. Can this be done as if I was downloading the file from a FTP server?

import urllib
import re

url = "http://www.someurl.com"

# Download the page locally
f = urllib.urlopen(url)
html = f.read()
f.close()

f = open ("temp.htm", "w")
f.write (html)
f.close()

# List only the .TXT / .ZIP files
fnames = re.findall('^.*<a href="(w+(?:.txt|.zip)?)".*$', html, re.MULTILINE)

for fname in fnames:
    print fname, "..."

    f = urllib.urlopen(url + "/" + fname)

    #### Here I want to check the filesize to download or not #### 
    file = f.read()
    f.close()

    f = open (fname, "w")
    f.write (file)
    f.close()

---

@Jon: thank for your quick answer. It works, but the filesize on the web server is slightly less than the filesize of the downloaded file.

Examples:

Local Size  Server Size
 2.223.533  2.115.516
   664.603    662.121

It has anything to do with the CR/LF conversion?

Answer 1

I have reproduced what you are seeing:

import urllib, os
link = "http://python.org"
print "opening url:", link
site = urllib.urlopen(link)
meta = site.info()
print "Content-Length:", meta.getheaders("Content-Length")[0]

f = open("out.txt", "r")
print "File on disk:",len(f.read())
f.close()


f = open("out.txt", "w")
f.write(site.read())
site.close()
f.close()

f = open("out.txt", "r")
print "File on disk after download:",len(f.read())
f.close()

print "os.stat().st_size returns:", os.stat("out.txt").st_size

Outputs this:

opening url: http://python.org
Content-Length: 16535
File on disk: 16535
File on disk after download: 16535
os.stat().st_size returns: 16861

What am I doing wrong here? Is os.stat().st_size not returning the correct size?

---

Edit: OK, I figured out what the problem was:

import urllib, os
link = "http://python.org"
print "opening url:", link
site = urllib.urlopen(link)
meta = site.info()
print "Content-Length:", meta.getheaders("Content-Length")[0]

f = open("out.txt", "rb")
print "File on disk:",len(f.read())
f.close()


f = open("out.txt", "wb")
f.write(site.read())
site.close()
f.close()

f = open("out.txt", "rb")
print "File on disk after download:",len(f.read())
f.close()

print "os.stat().st_size returns:", os.stat("out.txt").st_size

this outputs:

$ python test.py
opening url: http://python.org
Content-Length: 16535
File on disk: 16535
File on disk after download: 16535
os.stat().st_size returns: 16535

Make sure you are opening both files for binary read/write.

// open for binary write
open(filename, "wb")
// open for binary read
open(filename, "rb")