response = requests.get("https://secure-site.com/report.pdf", headers=headers, cookies=cookies, auth=("username", "password")) # Basic auth import requests url = "https://example.com/huge.pdf" response = requests.get(url, stream=True)
driver.quit() | Problem | Solution | |--------|----------| | 403 Forbidden | Add User-Agent header | | Slow download | Use stream=True with chunking | | PDF is actually HTML (login page) | Check response.headers['content-type'] — should be application/pdf | | HTTPS certificate error | verify=False (not recommended, but works) | | URL redirects | requests follows them automatically |
import requests Download and save a PDF url = "https://example.com/document.pdf" response = requests.get(url) dead simple python pdf download
from selenium import webdriver driver = webdriver.Chrome() driver.get("https://example.com/js-generated-pdf") pdf_url = driver.find_element("tag name", "embed").get_attribute("src") Download normally with requests import requests r = requests.get(pdf_url) with open("output.pdf", "wb") as f: f.write(r.content)
print(f"Saved: filename") download_pdf("https://www.w3.org/WAI/ER/tests/xhtml/testfiles/resources/pdf/dummy.pdf", "sample.pdf") 2. Handle Authentication & Headers (Many real PDFs) import requests headers = "User-Agent": "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36" response = requests
That’s it. But real PDF downloads can fail. Here’s the practical, copy-paste guide. import requests def download_pdf(url, filename): response = requests.get(url) response.raise_for_status() # Stop if error (404, 403, etc.)
with open("output.pdf", "wb") as f: f.write(response.content) Here’s the practical, copy-paste guide
with open(filename, "ab") as f: # 'ab' = append binary for chunk in response.iter_content(8192): f.write(chunk) import requests from concurrent.futures import ThreadPoolExecutor urls = [ "https://example.com/doc1.pdf", "https://example.com/doc2.pdf", ]