How to Download Webcomics with Python: urllib and BeautifulSoup?

Diagnosing Python Image Downloading Issue with urllib

The question at hand revolves around downloading webcomics to a designated folder using Python and the urllib module. The initial attempt encountered a problem where the file appeared to be cached rather than saved locally. Additionally, the method for determining the existence of new comics needed to be addressed.

Retrieving Files Correctly

The original code utilized urllib.URLopener() to retrieve the image. However, the more appropriate function for this task is urllib.urlretrieve(). This function directly saves the image to the specified location instead of merely caching it.

Determining Comic Count

To identify the number of comics on the website and download only the latest ones, the script can parse the website's HTML content. Here's a technique using the BeautifulSoup library:

import bs4

url = "http://www.gunnerkrigg.com//comics/"
html = requests.get(url).content
soup = bs4.BeautifulSoup(html, features='lxml')

comic_list = soup.find('select', {'id': 'comic-list'})
comic_count = len(comic_list.find_all('option'))

Complete Script

Combining the image downloading and comic count logic, the following script streamlines the webcomic downloading process:

import urllib.request
import bs4

def download_comics(url, path):
    """
    Downloads webcomics from the given URL to the specified path.
    """

    # Determine the comic count
    html = requests.get(url).content
    soup = bs4.BeautifulSoup(html, features='lxml')

    comic_list = soup.find('select', {'id': 'comic-list'})
    comic_count = len(comic_list.find_all('option'))

    # Download the comics
    for i in range(1, comic_count + 1):
        comic_url = url + str(i) + '.jpg'
        comic_name = str(i) + '.jpg'
        urllib.request.urlretrieve(comic_url, os.path.join(path, comic_name))

url = "http://www.gunnerkrigg.com//comics/"
path = "/file"

download_comics(url, path)

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