Check for binary content with Python requests library

Question

Looking at the requests documentation, I know that I can use response.content for binary content (such as a .jpg file) and response.text for a regular html page. However, when the source is an image, and I try to access r.text, the script hangs. How can I determine in advance if the response contains html?

I have considered checking the url for an image extension, but that does not seem fool-proof.

Answer 1

The content type should be a header. See this page in the documentation.

Example code:

r = requests.get(url)
if r.headers['content-type'] == 'text/html':
    data = r.text
elif r.headers['content-type'] == 'application/ogg':
    data = r.content