Does cURL NOBODY actually fetch the body?

Question

I\'m not sure if this function in CURL just strips the response body out but still load it fully. Is that true? I don\'t want to waste bandwidth, I just want the headers.

Answer 1

CURLOPT_NOBODY will send a HEAD request to web server. The server should respond with just the HTTP headers and no body content.

http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec9.html

The HEAD method is identical to GET except that the server MUST NOT return a message-body in the response.

Answer 2

It will only load the headers, it won't load the body of the requested document.

Answer 3

As you can see in official doc, It will not download the body if you enable it

https://curl.haxx.se/libcurl/c/CURLOPT_NOBODY.html

DESCRIPTION A long parameter set to 1 tells libcurl to not include the body-part in the output when doing what would otherwise be a download. For HTTP(S), this makes libcurl do a HEAD request. For most other protocols it means just not asking to transfer the body data.

Enabling this option means asking for a download but without a body.