将URL文本文件直接下载到CSV文件python

Question

I have a link to a text file from US Census and I would like to download it into a directory on my computer.

I was thinking about downloading the URL into a text file and then converting the text file into a csv later on. However, I was wondering if it were possible to download directly to a csv file? If it's possible, would appreciate an example.

This is the link to the data: https://www.census.gov/construction/bps/txt/tb2u2010.txt

Answer 1

I may be wrong here, but saving that as a .csv file would not be easy. I don't know Python very much but I'll leave my two cents here:

import urllib.request  # lib that handles URLs

target_url = "https://www.census.gov/construction/bps/txt/tb2u2010.txt"

data = urllib.request.urlopen(target_url)

with open('output.txt', 'w') as f:  # change this to .csv
    for line in data:
        f.write(str(data.read()))

This will create a .txt with everything from the website on a single line.