Trigger File Download Within IPython Notebook

Given an iPython notebook running on an external server, is there a way to trigger a file download? I would like to either be able to have the notebook be able to initiate the dow

Solution 1:

I got a working answer from the comments. FileLink did the job, which was to be able to download a file from a notebook.

from IPython.display import display, FileLink

local_file = FileLink('./demo.xlsx', result_html_prefix="Click here to download: ")
display(local_file)

For the sake of completeness, here is a similar example with FileLinks:

from IPython.display import display, FileLinks

local_file = FileLinks('./data/', result_html_prefix="Click here to download: ")
display(local_file)

It's not very pretty, so would love some advice for styling it..

Solution 2:

Alternatively, if the file's aren't too large and hence suitable for base64 encoding. This only works in 'recent browsers', but ipynb users will likely have one. This example works with JSON data.

from IPython.display import display, HTML
import json
import base64

encoded = base64.b64encode(json.dumps(data).encode('utf-8')).decode('utf-8')
HTML(f'<a href="data:application/json;base64,{encoded}" download="download.json">download</a>')

Solution 3:

You can use the urllib library to download files or request URLs.

testfile = urllib.URLopener()
testfile.retrieve("http://exmaple.com/file.txt", "file.txt")