How to Get an HTML Page from a URL in Python?

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This tutorial shows you how to perform simple HTTP get requests to get an HTML page from a given URL in Python!

Problem Formulation

Given a URL as a string. How to extract the HTML from the given URL and store the result in a Python string variable?

Example: Say, you want to accomplish the following:

url = 'https://google.com'

# ... Code to extract HTML page here ...

print(result)
# ... Google HTML file:
'''
<!doctype html><html itemscope="" itemtype="http://schema.org/WebPage" lang="de"><head><meta content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" http-equiv="Content-Type"><meta content="/images/branding/googleg/1x/googleg_standard_color_128dp.png" itemprop="image"><title>Google</title>...
'''

Let’s study the four most important methods to access a website in your Python script!

Method 1: requests.get(url)

How to Get an HTML Page from a URL in Python?

The simplest solution is the following:

import requests
print(requests.get(url = 'https://google.com').text)

Here’s how this one-liner works:

  • Import the Python library requests that handles the details of requesting the websites from the server in an easy-to-process format.
  • Use the requests.get(...) method to access the website and pass the URL 'https://google.com' as an argument so that the function knows which location to access.
  • Access the actual body of the get request (the return value is a request object that also contains some useful meta information like the file type, etc.).
  • Print the result to the shell.

The output is the desired Google website: 

'''
<!doctype html><html itemscope="" itemtype="http://schema.org/WebPage" lang="de"><head><meta content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" http-equiv="Content-Type"><meta content="/images/branding/googleg/1x/googleg_standard_color_128dp.png" itemprop="image"><title>Google</title>...
'''

Note that you may have to install the requests library with the following command in your operating system terminal:

$ pip install requests

Method 2: One-Liner with requests.get()

Sometimes you don’t want to open an interactive Python session to access the URL. No problem, you can make the previous solution a one-liner and run it from your operating system command line or terminal.

Note that the semicolon is used to one-linerize the previously discussed method. This is useful if you want to run this command from your operating system with the following command:

python -r "import requests; print(requests.get(url = 'https://google.com').text)"

The output, again, is the desired Google HTML page:

'''
<!doctype html><html itemscope="" itemtype="http://schema.org/WebPage" lang="de"><head><meta content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" http-equiv="Content-Type"><meta content="/images/branding/googleg/1x/googleg_standard_color_128dp.png" itemprop="image"><title>Google</title>...
'''

Method 3: urllib.request

A recommended way to fetch web resources from a website is the urllib.request() function. This also works to create a simple one-liner to access the Google website in Python 3 as before:

import urllib.request as r
page = r.urlopen('https://google.com')
print(page.read())

Again, you return a Request object that can be accessed to read the server’s response.

Note that this reads the file as a byte string. If you want to read the HTML file as a string, you need to convert the result using Python’s decode() method:

import urllib.request as r
page = r.urlopen('https://google.com')
print(page.read().decode('utf8'))

Here’s the output of this code snippet with most of the HTML content omitted for brevity.

<!doctype html>...</html>

🌍 Recommended Tutorial: How to Open a URL in Your Browser From a Python Script?

Method 4: One-Liner with urllib.request

You can also cram everything into a single line so that you can run it from your OS’s terminal:

python -r "import urllib.request as r; print(r.urlopen('https://google.com').read())"

Try It Yourself

You can try Methods 1 and 3 yourself in our interactive Juypter notebook with your own desired website URL:

How to Get an HTML Page from a URL in Python? Interactive Shell
Click to get the HTML code from your own URL in your browser.

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