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

urllib2.urlopen does an HTTP GET (or POST if you supply a data argument), not an HTTP HEAD (if it did the latter, you couldn't do readlines or other accesses to the page body, of course).