How to get pdf filename with Python requests?

Building on some of the other answers, here's how I do it. If there isn't a Content-Disposition header, I parse it from the download URL:

import re
import requests
from requests.exceptions import RequestException


url = 'http://www.example.com/downloads/sample.pdf'

try:
    with requests.get(url) as r:

        fname = ''
        if "Content-Disposition" in r.headers.keys():
            fname = re.findall("filename=(.+)", r.headers["Content-Disposition"])[0]
        else:
            fname = url.split("/")[-1]

        print(fname)
except RequestException as e:
    print(e)

There are arguably better ways of parsing the URL string, but for simplicity I didn't want to involve any more libraries.


It is specified in an http header content-disposition. So to extract the name you would do:

import re
d = r.headers['content-disposition']
fname = re.findall("filename=(.+)", d)[0]

Name extracted from the string via regular expression (re module).