import urllib.request url = 'https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ReneNyffenegger/about-python/master/standard-library/urllib/request/demo.py' html_text = urllib.request.urlopen(url).read() # # The type of html_text is 'bytes' # print(html_text.decode('utf-8')) urllib.request.urlretrieve (url, 'downloaded-script.py');