How to get content type of a web address?

Question

I want to get type of a web address. For example this is a Html page and its page type is text/html but the type of this is text/xml. this page\'s

Answer 1

Read up on HTTP headers.

HTTP headers will tell you the content type. For example:

content-type: application/xml.

There are two ways to determining the content-type

1. the file extension invoked by the URL
2. the http header content-type

The first one was somewhat promoted by microsoft during to old days and is not a good practice anymore.

If the client has display constraints accepting only certain content-type, it would request the server with the headers like

accept: application/json
accept: text/html
accept: application/xml

And then if the server could supply one of those and chooses XML it would return the content with the header

content-type: application/xml.

However, some services include further information like

content-type: application/xml; charset=utf-8

rather than using a header of its own for the character encoding.