from selenium import webdriver driver = webdriver.Chrome() driver.get("https://example.com/js-generated-pdf") pdf_url = driver.find_element("tag name", "embed").get_attribute("src") Download normally with requests import requests r = requests.get(pdf_url) with open("output.pdf", "wb") as f: f.write(r.content)
Save as pdf_downloader.py , call with your URL and filename. Done.
with open("large.pdf", "wb") as f: for chunk in response.iter_content(chunk_size=8192): f.write(chunk) import requests import os url = "https://example.com/bigfile.pdf" filename = "resumed.pdf" Check existing partial file existing_size = os.path.getsize(filename) if os.path.exists(filename) else 0
import requests Download and save a PDF url = "https://example.com/document.pdf" response = requests.get(url) dead simple python pdf download
def download_one(url): name = url.split("/")[-1] r = requests.get(url) with open(name, "wb") as f: f.write(r.content) print(f"Done: name")
response = requests.get("https://secure-site.com/report.pdf", headers=headers, cookies=cookies, auth=("username", "password")) # Basic auth import requests url = "https://example.com/huge.pdf" response = requests.get(url, stream=True)
with open("output.pdf", "wb") as f: f.write(response.content) from selenium import webdriver driver = webdriver
headers = "Range": f"bytes=existing_size-" response = requests.get(url, headers=headers, stream=True)
driver.quit() | Problem | Solution | |--------|----------| | 403 Forbidden | Add User-Agent header | | Slow download | Use stream=True with chunking | | PDF is actually HTML (login page) | Check response.headers['content-type'] — should be application/pdf | | HTTPS certificate error | verify=False (not recommended, but works) | | URL redirects | requests follows them automatically |
if 'application/pdf' in response.headers.get('content-type', ''): print("It's a PDF") else: print("Probably a login page or error") import urllib.request; urllib.request.urlretrieve("https://example.com/file.pdf", "out.pdf") Summary: The Only Code You Really Need import requests def download_pdf_safe(url, output_path): try: headers = 'User-Agent': 'Mozilla/5.0' r = requests.get(url, headers=headers, stream=True, timeout=30) r.raise_for_status() Handle Authentication & Headers (Many real PDFs) import
with open(filename, 'wb') as f: f.write(response.content)
print(f"Saved: filename") download_pdf("https://www.w3.org/WAI/ER/tests/xhtml/testfiles/resources/pdf/dummy.pdf", "sample.pdf") 2. Handle Authentication & Headers (Many real PDFs) import requests headers = "User-Agent": "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36"