源代码可以是:

import urllib
sock = urllib.urlopen("http://diveintopython.org/")
htmlSource = sock.read()                            
sock.close()                                        
print htmlSource  

如果速度对你来说很重要，我为urllib和wget模块做了一个小的性能测试，关于wget，我尝试了一次状态栏和一次没有状态栏。我使用了三个不同的500MB文件进行测试(不同的文件-以消除在底层进行缓存的可能性)。在debian机器上测试，使用python2。

首先，这些是结果(它们在不同的运行中是相似的):

$ python wget_test.py 
urlretrive_test : starting
urlretrive_test : 6.56
==============
wget_no_bar_test : starting
wget_no_bar_test : 7.20
==============
wget_with_bar_test : starting
100% [......................................................................] 541335552 / 541335552
wget_with_bar_test : 50.49
==============

我执行测试的方式是使用“profile”装饰器。这是完整的代码:

import wget
import urllib
import time
from functools import wraps

def profile(func):
    @wraps(func)
    def inner(*args):
        print func.__name__, ": starting"
        start = time.time()
        ret = func(*args)
        end = time.time()
        print func.__name__, ": {:.2f}".format(end - start)
        return ret
    return inner

url1 = 'http://host.com/500a.iso'
url2 = 'http://host.com/500b.iso'
url3 = 'http://host.com/500c.iso'

def do_nothing(*args):
    pass

@profile
def urlretrive_test(url):
    return urllib.urlretrieve(url)

@profile
def wget_no_bar_test(url):
    return wget.download(url, out='/tmp/', bar=do_nothing)

@profile
def wget_with_bar_test(url):
    return wget.download(url, out='/tmp/')

urlretrive_test(url1)
print '=============='
time.sleep(1)

wget_no_bar_test(url2)
print '=============='
time.sleep(1)

wget_with_bar_test(url3)
print '=============='
time.sleep(1)

Urllib似乎是最快的

我同意Corey的观点，urllib2比urllib更完整，如果你想做更复杂的事情，应该使用urllib2模块，但为了让答案更完整，如果你只想要基本的东西，urllib是一个更简单的模块:

import urllib
response = urllib.urlopen('http://www.example.com/sound.mp3')
mp3 = response.read()

会很好。或者，如果你不想处理"response"对象，你可以直接调用read():

import urllib
mp3 = urllib.urlopen('http://www.example.com/sound.mp3').read()

Python 2/3的PabloG代码的改进版本:

#!/usr/bin/env python
# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
from __future__ import ( division, absolute_import, print_function, unicode_literals )

import sys, os, tempfile, logging

if sys.version_info >= (3,):
    import urllib.request as urllib2
    import urllib.parse as urlparse
else:
    import urllib2
    import urlparse

def download_file(url, dest=None):
    """ 
    Download and save a file specified by url to dest directory,
    """
    u = urllib2.urlopen(url)

    scheme, netloc, path, query, fragment = urlparse.urlsplit(url)
    filename = os.path.basename(path)
    if not filename:
        filename = 'downloaded.file'
    if dest:
        filename = os.path.join(dest, filename)

    with open(filename, 'wb') as f:
        meta = u.info()
        meta_func = meta.getheaders if hasattr(meta, 'getheaders') else meta.get_all
        meta_length = meta_func("Content-Length")
        file_size = None
        if meta_length:
            file_size = int(meta_length[0])
        print("Downloading: {0} Bytes: {1}".format(url, file_size))

        file_size_dl = 0
        block_sz = 8192
        while True:
            buffer = u.read(block_sz)
            if not buffer:
                break

            file_size_dl += len(buffer)
            f.write(buffer)

            status = "{0:16}".format(file_size_dl)
            if file_size:
                status += "   [{0:6.2f}%]".format(file_size_dl * 100 / file_size)
            status += chr(13)
            print(status, end="")
        print()

    return filename

if __name__ == "__main__":  # Only run if this file is called directly
    print("Testing with 10MB download")
    url = "http://download.thinkbroadband.com/10MB.zip"
    filename = download_file(url)
    print(filename)

为了这个目的，用纯Python编写了wget库。从2.0版开始，它就为urlretrieve注入了这些特性。

使用wget模块:

import wget
wget.download('url')