ANALYSIS TOOL BOX

Data Collection

FetchPDFFromURL

Download a PDF file from a URL and save it to the local filesystem.

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Introduction

Building a document corpus — regulatory filings, public reports, research papers — usually starts with the tedious question "how do I get all these PDFs onto disk reliably?" FetchPDFFromURL handles the download in one call: it requests the file, checks that the response actually succeeded, and writes the binary content to disk, so a failed download doesn't silently produce a corrupt or empty file. Reach for it when automating collection of public documents at scale, rather than writing one-off requests calls with no error handling.

Teaching Note

Common use cases include:

  • Automating the collection of public reports or documents from government websites
  • Building document corpora for research or analysis
  • Batch downloading of PDFs for archival purposes
  • Creating local caches of remote PDF resources

Parameters

ParameterTypeDefaultDescription
urlrequired—The URL of the PDF file to download. Must be a valid HTTP/HTTPS URL pointing to a PDF resource.
filenamerequired—The name (or path) of the file to save the downloaded PDF to. Should include the '.pdf' extension. Can be a relative filename (saves to current directory) or an absolute path.

Example

python
from analysistoolbox.data_collection import FetchPDFFromURL

# Download a PDF from a URL and save it locally
FetchPDFFromURL(
    url='https://example.com/document.pdf',
    filename='downloaded_document.pdf'
)