How do you save a Google Sheets file as CSV from Python 3 (or 2)?

Question

I am looking for a simple way to save a csv file originating from a published Google Sheets document? Since it\'s published, it\'s accessible through a direct link (modified

Answer 1

Google responds to the initial request with a series of cookie-setting 302 redirects. If you don't store and resubmit the cookies between requests, it redirects you to the login page.

So, the problem is not with the User-Agent header, it's the fact that by default, urllib.request.urlopen doesn't store cookies, but it will follow the HTTP 302 redirects.

The following code works just fine on a public spreadsheet available at the location specified by DOC_URL:

>>> from http.cookiejar import CookieJar
>>> from urllib.request import build_opener, HTTPCookieProcessor
>>> opener = build_opener(HTTPCookieProcessor(CookieJar()))
>>> resp = opener.open(DOC_URL)
>>> # should really parse resp.getheader('content-type') for encoding.
>>> csv_content = resp.read().decode('utf-8')

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Having shown you how to do it in vanilla python, I'll now say that the Right Way™ to go about this is to use the most-excellent requests library. It is extremely well documented and makes these sorts of tasks incredibly pleasant to complete.

For instance, to get the same csv_content as above using the requests library is as simple as:

>>> import requests
>>> csv_content = requests.get(DOC_URL).text

That single line expresses your intent more clearly. It's easier to write and easier to read. Do yourself - and anyone else who shares your codebase - a favor and just use requests.