Question

I need to check whether a page is being redirected or not without actually downloading the content. I just need the final URL. What’s the best way of doing this is Python? Thanks!

Answer 1

If you specifically want to avoid downloading the content, you’ll need to use the HEAD request method. I believe the urllib and urllib2 libraries do not support HEAD requests, so you’ll have to use the lower-level httplib library:

import httplib  h = httplib.HTTPConnection('www.example.com') h.request('HEAD', '/') response = h.getresponse()  // Check for 30x status code if 300 <= response.status < 400:     // It's a redirect     location = response.getheader('Location')