How to get pdf filename with Python requests?

Question

I'm using the Python requests lib to get a PDF file from the web. This works fine, but I now also want the original filename. If I go to a PDF file in Firefox and click download it already has a filename defined to save the pdf. How do I get this filename?

For example:

import requests
r = requests.get('http://www.researchgate.net/profile/M_Gotic/publication/260197848_Mater_Sci_Eng_B47_%281997%29_33/links/0c9605301e48beda0f000000.pdf')
print r.headers['content-type']  # prints 'application/pdf'

I checked the r.headers for anything interesting, but there's no filename in there. I was actually hoping for something like r.filename..

Does anybody know how I can get the filename of a downloaded PDF file with requests library?

Answer 1

It is specified in an http header content-disposition. So to extract the name you would do:

import re
d = r.headers['content-disposition']
fname = re.findall("filename=(.+)", d)

Name extracted from the string via regular expression (re module).

Answer 2

Apparently, for this particular resource it is in:

r.headers['content-disposition']

Don't know if it is always the case, though.

Answer 3

Building on some of the other answers, here's how I do it. If there isn't a Content-Disposition header, I parse it from the download URL.

import re
import requests
from request.exceptions import RequestException


url = 'http://www.example.com/downloads/sample.pdf'

try:
    with requests.get(url) as r:

        fname = ''
        if "Content-Disposition" in r.headers.keys():
            fname = re.findall("filename=(.+)", r.headers["Content-Disposition"])[0]
        else:
            fname = url.split("/")[-1]

        print(fname)
except RequestException as e:
    print(e)

There are arguably better ways of parsing the URL string, but for simplicity I didn't want to involve any more libraries.

Answer 4

You can use werkzeug for options headers https://werkzeug.palletsprojects.com/en/0.15.x/http/#werkzeug.http.parse_options_header

>>> import werkzeug


>>> werkzeug.parse_options_header('text/html; charset=utf8')
('text/html', {'charset': 'utf8'})