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 a

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.