Simple Python Script to Scrape and Download All Files from a Web Page (Bite-size Article)

Introduction A while back, I needed a certain dataset (Excel files) from a particular website. But unfortunately, there was no “download all” button, so I was stuck downloading each file one by one. There were over 60 files in total, which was incredibly tedious. However, I discovered that by using Python, I could automatically fetch all the links and download them in bulk. In the end, I managed to skip all the manual work simply by running a Python script to download everything at once. This approach—using Python to gather links automatically and perform a bulk download—is extremely handy when there are many CSV or Excel files linked on a page and you don’t want to download each one manually. Of course, there might be simpler or more elegant solutions out there that I’m unaware of, but as someone who’s still very new to Python, this was also a great learning experience for me. With that in mind, as a personal record (and in case it helps someone else), I’d like to share how to use Python to automatically retrieve and save any .csv, .xls, or .xlsx files found on a specified webpage. Setup and Implementation Steps First, install the necessary libraries: pip install requests beautifulsoup4 By using the code below, you can extract all download links for specific file types from the target page and save them all at once.

Apr 18, 2025 - 20:36

Simple Python Script to Scrape and Download All Files from a Web Page (Bite-size Article)

Introduction

A while back, I needed a certain dataset (Excel files) from a particular website. But unfortunately, there was no “download all” button, so I was stuck downloading each file one by one. There were over 60 files in total, which was incredibly tedious.

However, I discovered that by using Python, I could automatically fetch all the links and download them in bulk. In the end, I managed to skip all the manual work simply by running a Python script to download everything at once.

This approach—using Python to gather links automatically and perform a bulk download—is extremely handy when there are many CSV or Excel files linked on a page and you don’t want to download each one manually.

Of course, there might be simpler or more elegant solutions out there that I’m unaware of, but as someone who’s still very new to Python, this was also a great learning experience for me.

With that in mind, as a personal record (and in case it helps someone else), I’d like to share how to use Python to automatically retrieve and save any .csv, .xls, or .xlsx files found on a specified webpage.

Setup and Implementation Steps

First, install the necessary libraries:

pip install requests beautifulsoup4

By using the code below, you can extract all download links for specific file types from the target page and save them all at once.