AttributeError: 'module' object has no attribute 'urlretrieve'

Question

I am trying to write a program that will download mp3's off of a website then join them together but whenever I try to download the files I get this error:

Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/home/tesla/PycharmProjects/OldSpice/Voicemail.py", line 214, in <module> main()
File "/home/tesla/PycharmProjects/OldSpice/Voicemail.py", line 209, in main getMp3s()
File "/home/tesla/PycharmProjects/OldSpice/Voicemail.py", line 134, in getMp3s
raw_mp3.add = urllib.urlretrieve("http://www-scf.usc.edu/~chiso/oldspice/m-b1-hello.mp3")
AttributeError: 'module' object has no attribute 'urlretrieve'

The line that is causing this problem is

raw_mp3.add = urllib.urlretrieve("http://www-scf.usc.edu/~chiso/oldspice/m-b1-hello.mp3")

score 256 · Accepted Answer · edited Mar 18 '21 at 15:49

256

As you're using Python 3, there is no urllib module anymore. It has been split into several modules.

This would be equivalent to urlretrieve:

import urllib.request
data = urllib.request.urlretrieve("http://...")

urlretrieve behaves exactly the same way as it did in Python 2.x, so it'll work just fine.

Basically:

urlretrieve saves the file to a temporary file and returns a tuple (filename, headers)
urlopen returns a Request object whose read method returns a bytestring containing the file contents

edited Mar 18 '21 at 15:49

iacob

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answered Jul 31 '13 at 03:26

dom0

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2

If I wanted to download the .mp3 files into a list would this still work? – Sike1217 Jul 31 '13 at 03:39
3

Ran across this error when working through google's tensorflow machine learning tutorial (I'm new to python so your answer is greatly appreciated) http://www.tensorflow.org/tutorials/mnist/beginners/index.md – Chris Smith Nov 13 '15 at 03:04

Martin Thoma · Answer 2 · 2017-02-11T14:03:39.577

11

A Python 2+3 compatible solution is:

import sys

if sys.version_info[0] >= 3:
    from urllib.request import urlretrieve
else:
    # Not Python 3 - today, it is most likely to be Python 2
    # But note that this might need an update when Python 4
    # might be around one day
    from urllib import urlretrieve

# Get file from URL like this:
urlretrieve("http://www-scf.usc.edu/~chiso/oldspice/m-b1-hello.mp3")

edited Feb 11 '17 at 14:03

answered Dec 07 '15 at 07:10

Martin Thoma

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@tim654321 I changed it. You are right, there is a chance that this will be the same for Python 3 and later versions. – Martin Thoma Jun 06 '16 at 08:06
A comment to your comment ("Not Python 3..."): Since you are checking `>= 3`, the concern regarding Python4 is not a valid one. – Martin R. Sep 01 '17 at 17:15
@MartinR. or rather, ..., the notes about Python 4 should be in the `>= 3` block instead. – Jesse Chisholm May 01 '18 at 23:29

score 5 · Answer 3 · answered Feb 21 '18 at 00:14

Suppose you have following lines of code

MyUrl = "www.google.com" #Your url goes here
urllib.urlretrieve(MyUrl)

If you are receiving following error message

AttributeError: module 'urllib' has no attribute 'urlretrieve'

Then you should try following code to fix the issue:

import urllib.request
MyUrl = "www.google.com" #Your url goes here
urllib.request.urlretrieve(MyUrl)

AttributeError: 'module' object has no attribute 'urlretrieve'

3 Answers3

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