Downloading Images with Python's urllib

Downloading images from the web is a common task in Python. One of the most straightforward ways to do this is by utilizing the urllib module.

In this particular case, the goal is to retrieve and store a webcomic in a specific folder on the user's desktop. To accomplish this, the code employs the following steps:

import urllib
import os

# Determine the starting comic number based on the number of existing files
comicCounter = len(os.listdir('/file'))   1

# Define a function to download a single comic
def download_comic(url, comicName):
    image = urllib.URLopener()
    image.retrieve(url, comicName)

The download_comic function takes in a URL and a filename and downloads the image at that URL, saving it as the specified file name.

To handle the looping through comics with incrementing file names, the code uses a while loop and a series of conditional statements based on the current comic number to generate the appropriate URL and filename:

while comicCounter 
The code also handles potential 404 errors encountered while downloading comics, incrementing an error count and printing a message if a specific comic number is not found. Once all the comics have been downloaded, the script prints a completion message.