You can also use urllib, which makes it a one-liner: >>> import urllib >>> doc = urllib.urlopen('ftp://ftp.example.com/foo.txt').read() PyCurl is anot

You can also use urllib, which makes it a one-liner: >>> import urllib >>> doc = urllib.urlopen('ftp://ftp.example.com/foo.txt').read() PyCurl is another popular choice, though less simple to use.