A high-level cross-protocol url-grabber.

Using urlgrabber, data can be fetched in three basic ways:

urlgrab(url) copy the file to the local filesystem urlopen(url) open the remote file and return a file object (like urllib2.urlopen) urlread(url) return the contents of the file as a string

When using these functions (or methods), urlgrabber supports the following features:

• identical behavior for http://, ftp://, and file:// urls
• http keepalive - faster downloads of many files by using only a single connection
• byte ranges - fetch only a portion of the file
• reget - for a urlgrab, resume a partial download
• progress meters - the ability to report download progress automatically, even when using urlopen!
• throttling - restrict bandwidth usage
• retries - automatically retry a download if it fails. The number of retries and failure types are configurable.
• authenticated server access for http and ftp
• proxy support - support for authenticated http and ftp proxies
• mirror groups - treat a list of mirrors as a single source, automatically switching mirrors if there is a failure.