How do you send a HEAD HTTP request in Python 2?

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

urllib2 can be used to perform a HEAD request. This is a little nicer than using httplib since urllib2 parses the URL for you instead of requiring you to split the URL into host name and path.

>>> import urllib2
>>> class HeadRequest(urllib2.Request):
...     def get_method(self):
...         return "HEAD"
... 
>>> response = urllib2.urlopen(HeadRequest("http://google.com/index.html"))

Headers are available via response.info() as before. Interestingly, you can find the URL that you were redirected to:

>>> print response.geturl()
http://www.google.com.au/index.html