You gotta love a 2-line python solution

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Mon, 2 May 2016 08:12 pm, Marko Rauhamaa wrote:

> For example, the urlretrieve() function above blocks. You can't use it
> with the asyncio or select modules.


The urlretrieve function is one of the oldest functions in the std library.
It literally only exists because Guido was working on a computer somewhere,
found that he did have wget, and decided it would be faster to write his
own in Python than download and install wget.

And because this was very early in Python's history, the barrier to getting
into the std lib was much less, especially for stuff Guido wrote himself,
so there it is. These days, I doubt it would be included. It would probably
be a recipe in the docs.

Compared to a full-featured tool like wget or curl, urlretrieve is missing a
lot of stuff which is considered essential, like limiting/configuring the
rate, support for cookies and authentication, retrying on error, etc.



-- 
Steven