Getting Website Favicons using Python

A favicon is a small graphical representation of a website that appears in a browser tab or on a bookmark list. It’s essential to a website’s branding and helps users quickly identify the site they are visiting. A website’s favicon is typically stored in the root directory of the website and has a .ico file extension.

In this article, we will explore a Python application that can download the favicons of a list of websites. The application will benefit web developers and designers who want to study and collect favicons from different websites. The application is written using the Python programming language and is easy to use.

The application is written in a few simple steps. First, we will import the required libraries, such as the requests library, which is used to make HTTP requests, and the os library, which works with the file system. Next, we will read the list of domains from an external text file and iterate over each domain, making an HTTP request to retrieve the favicon. Finally, we will save the favicon to the file system, using a meaningful name that indicates the domain it was downloaded from.

The first step in writing the Python application is to create the domains.txt file. This file will contain the list of domains we want to download the favicons. The domains.txt file should be stored in the same directory as the Python script. A sample domains.txt file might look like this:

www.google.com
www.facebook.com
www.twitter.com

Next, we will write the Python script to download the favicons from the list of domains. The script is as follows:

import requests
import os

def download_favicon(domain):
    response = requests.get(f"https://{domain}/favicon.ico")
    If response.status_code == 200:
        with open(f"{domain}.ico", "wb") as f:
            f.write(response.content)

with open("domains.txt") as f:
    domains = [line.strip() for line in f]

for domain in domains:
    download_favicon(domain)

This script, the download_favicon function is used to download the favicon for a given domain. It uses the requests library to make an HTTP GET request to retrieve the favicon and checks the response’s status code to ensure that the request was successful. If the request is successful, the function writes the favicon to a file using the write method of a binary file object.

The script then uses the open function to read the list of domains from the external text file and creates a list of domains using a list comprehension. Finally, the script iterates over the list of domains, calling the download_favicon function for each domain to download its favicon.

In conclusion, downloading favicons from a list of domains is a simple task that can be accomplished with a few lines of Python code. With the help of libraries such as requests and os, you can quickly implement this functionality and take advantage of Python’s power and versatility to build valuable and innovative applications.