Question

What I’m trying to do here is get the headers of a given URL so I can determine the MIME type. I want to be able to see if http://somedomain/foo/ will return an HTML document or a JPEG image for example. Thus, I need to figure out how to send a HEAD request so that I can read the MIME type without having to download the content. Does anyone know of an easy way of doing this?

Answer 1

edit: This answer works, but nowadays you should just use the requests library as mentioned by other answers below.

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Use httplib.

>>> import httplib >>> conn = httplib.HTTPConnection('www.google.com') >>> conn.request('HEAD', '/index.html') >>> res = conn.getresponse() >>> print res.status, res.reason 200 OK >>> print res.getheaders() [('content-length', '0'), ('expires', '-1'), ('server', 'gws'), ('cache-control', 'private, max-age=0'), ('date', 'Sat, 20 Sep 2008 06:43:36 GMT'), ('content-type', 'text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1')] 

There’s also a getheader(name) to get a specific header.