Trying to download data from URL with CSV File

Question

I'm slightly new to Python and have a question as to why the following code doesn't produce any output in the csv file. The code is as follows:

import csv
import urllib2

url = 'http://www.rba.gov.au/statistics/tables/csv/f17-yields.csv'
response = urllib2.urlopen(url)
cr = csv.reader(response)

for row in cr:
    with open("AusCentralbank.csv", "wb") as f:
        writer = csv.writer(f)
        writer.writerows(row)

Cheers.

Edit :

Brien and Albert solved the initial issue I had. However, I now have one further question. When I download the CSV File which I have listed above which is in " http://www.rba.gov.au/statistics/tables/#interest-rates " under Zero-coupon "Interest Rates - Analytical Series - 2009 to Current - F17" and is the F-17 Yields CSV I see that it has 5 workbooks and I actually just want to gather the data in the 5th Workbook. Is there a way I could do this? Cheers.

Answer 1

I could only test my code using Python 3. However, the only diffence should be urllib2 , hence I am using urllib.respose for opening the desired url.

The variable html is type bytes and can generally be written to a file in binary mode. Additionally, your source is a csv-file already, so there should be no need to convert it somehow:

#!/usr/bin/env python3
# coding: utf-8

import urllib

url = 'http://www.rba.gov.au/statistics/tables/csv/f17-yields.csv'

response = urllib.request.urlopen(url)
html = response.read()

with open('output.csv', 'wb') as f:
        f.write(html)

Answer 2

It is probably because of your opening mode.

According to documentation :

'w' for only writing (an existing file with the same name will be erased)

You should use append( a ) mode to append it to the end of the file.

'a' opens the file for appending; any data written to the file is automatically added to the end.

Also, since the file you are trying to download is csv file, you don't need to convert it.

Answer 3

@albert had a great answer. I've gone ahead and converted it to the equivalent Python 2.x code. You were doing a bit too much work in your original program; since the file was already a csv you didn't need to do any special work to turn it into a csv.

import urllib2

url = 'http://www.rba.gov.au/statistics/tables/csv/f17-yields.csv'

response = urllib2.urlopen(url)
html = response.read()

with open('AusCentralbank.csv', 'wb') as f:
    f.write(html)