What’s the best way to get an HTTP response code from a URL?

Question

I’m looking for a quick way to get an HTTP response code from a URL (i.e. 200, 404, etc). I’m not sure which library to use.

Answer 1

You should use urllib2, like this:

import urllib2
for url in ["http://entrian.com/", "http://entrian.com/does-not-exist/"]:
    try:
        connection = urllib2.urlopen(url)
        print connection.getcode()
        connection.close()
    except urllib2.HTTPError, e:
        print e.getcode()

# Prints:
# 200 [from the try block]
# 404 [from the except block]