Python: Get HTTP headers from urllib2.urlopen call?

Question

Does urllib2 fetch the whole page when a urlopen call is made?

I\'d like to just read the HTTP response header without getting the page.

Answer 1

What about sending a HEAD request instead of a normal GET request. The following snipped (copied from a similar question) does exactly that.

>>> 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')]