How to Download CSV From a Google Colab Python Notebook


How can we download a CSV created in in Google Colab to our local machine?

I recently exported a DataFrame to CSV and needed a way to download that CSV to my computer.

Suppose we run this line in the notebook.

df.to_csv('filename.csv') 

How can we download this newly created CSV file?

Using files from google.colab#

We can use built-in download functionality from google.colab to get the CSV to our local machine.

from google.colab import files
files.download('filename.csv')

Using the GUI#

We can also just use the Google Colab GUI to achieve this.

As of January 2020, we can follow these steps:

  1. Click the folder icon (📁) in the left pane
  2. If the CSV is not there, click Refresh
  3. Right click the CSV
  4. Select Download