Downloading OpenWebText Subset via Hugging Face

Downloading OpenWebText Subset via Hugging Face | Generated by AI

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The dataset you’re referring to is hosted on Hugging Face under the repo ID Skylion007/openwebtext. The specific file subsets/urlsf_subset00.tar is publicly accessible (no auth required), so you can download it using the Hugging Face CLI tool (huggingface-cli). Here’s how:

Prerequisites

Install the Hugging Face Hub CLI if you haven’t already:
```
pip install huggingface_hub
```
(Optional) If you have the huggingface-cli command aliased as hf (common on some systems), you can use that shorthand. Otherwise, use the full huggingface-cli prefix.

Download Command

Run this in your terminal:

huggingface-cli download Skylion007/openwebtext subsets/urlsf_subset00.tar --local-dir ./openwebtext

This will download the file to ./openwebtext/subsets/urlsf_subset00.tar (creating the subsets subdir if needed).
The file is quite large (~1.5 GB uncompressed, but it’s a tarball), so ensure you have enough disk space and a stable connection.
If you want to download it without the repo structure (directly to the current dir), add --repo-type dataset (though it’s implied here) or adjust --local-dir.

Using Python (Alternative)

If you prefer scripting it in Python (e.g., via the huggingface_hub library):

from huggingface_hub import hf_hub_download

# Download to current directory
hf_hub_download(
    repo_id="Skylion007/openwebtext",
    filename="subsets/urlsf_subset00.tar",
    local_dir="./openwebtext",  # Optional: specifies base dir
    repo_type="dataset"
)

Install the lib first: pip install huggingface_hub.

Notes

This is a subset of OpenWebText (a large web corpus). After downloading, you’ll need to extract the .tar file (e.g., tar -xvf subsets/urlsf_subset00.tar).
If the download fails (e.g., due to network issues), retry or use --cache-dir to specify a custom cache location.
For the full dataset or other subsets, check the repo page: https://huggingface.co/datasets/Skylion007/openwebtext.

If you run into errors, share the output for debugging!

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