These are some notebooks demonstrating various ways to download data using Python packages. These examples are intended to be run using an ArcGIS Desktop install of Python.

Prior to running these notebooks, various Python packages need to be installed. See this link for instructions how to do this.

These examples include the following hands on demonstrations:

• A refresher on ways to import local data files using native file objects, csv, numpy, and pandas
• Accessing web-hosted csv and txt files directly using pandas
• Fetching files on a web server with urllib
• Fetching files on an ftp server with ftplib
• Grabbing HTML tables with pandas
• Scraping data with requests and bs4
• Using specialized Python packages for data download Census

The objectives of this lesson are twofold:

• First, it will reveal some actual strategies for automating data download for your course projects or for other tasks.
• Second, it introduces concepts relating to "web-GIS" and "cloud computing" that we will follow up in subsequent lectures...