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

Here's an httplib solution that behaves like urllib2. You can just give it a URL and it just works. No need to mess about splitting up your URLs into hostname and path. This function already does that.

import httplib
import socket
def get_link_status(url):
  """
    Gets the HTTP status of the url or returns an error associated with it.  Always returns a string.
  """
  https=False
  url=re.sub(r'(.*)#.*$',r'\1',url)
  url=url.split('/',3)
  if len(url) > 3:
    path='/'+url[3]
  else:
    path='/'
  if url[0] == 'http:':
    port=80
  elif url[0] == 'https:':
    port=443
    https=True
  if ':' in url[2]:
    host=url[2].split(':')[0]
    port=url[2].split(':')[1]
  else:
    host=url[2]
  try:
    headers={'User-Agent':'Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Ubuntu; Linux x86_64; rv:26.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/26.0',
             'Host':host
             }
    if https:
      conn=httplib.HTTPSConnection(host=host,port=port,timeout=10)
    else:
      conn=httplib.HTTPConnection(host=host,port=port,timeout=10)
    conn.request(method="HEAD",url=path,headers=headers)
    response=str(conn.getresponse().status)
    conn.close()
  except socket.gaierror,e:
    response="Socket Error (%d): %s" % (e[0],e[1])
  except StandardError,e:
    if hasattr(e,'getcode') and len(e.getcode()) > 0:
      response=str(e.getcode())
    if hasattr(e, 'message') and len(e.message) > 0:
      response=str(e.message)
    elif hasattr(e, 'msg') and len(e.msg) > 0:
      response=str(e.msg)
    elif type('') == type(e):
      response=e
    else:
      response="Exception occurred without a good error message.  Manually check the URL to see the status.  If it is believed this URL is 100% good then file a issue for a potential bug."
  return response