How to safely get the file extension from a URL?

Question

Consider the following URLs

http://m3u.com/tunein.m3u
http://asxsomeurl.com/listen.asx:8024
http://www.plssomeotherurl.com/station.pls?id=111
http://22.198.133.16:802         


        

Answer 1

This is easiest with requests and mimetypes:

import requests
import mimetypes

response = requests.get(url)
content_type = response.headers['content-type']
extension = mimetypes.guess_extension(content_type)

The extension includes a dot prefix. For example, extension is '.png' for content type 'image/png'.