How do you send a HEAD HTTP request in Python 2?

Question

urllib2 can be used to perform a HEAD request. This is a little nicer than using httplib since urllib2 parses the URL for you instead of requiring you to split the URL into host name and path.

>>> import urllib2
>>> class HeadRequest(urllib2.Request):
...     def get_method(self):
...         return "HEAD"
... 
>>> response = urllib2.urlopen(HeadRequest("http://google.com/index.html"))

Headers are available via response.info() as before. Interestingly, you can find the URL that you were redirected to:

>>> print response.geturl()
http://www.google.com.au/index.html

edit: This answer works, but nowadays you should just use the requests library as mentioned by other answers below.

---

Use httplib.

>>> import httplib
>>> conn = httplib.HTTPConnection("www.google.com")
>>> conn.request("HEAD", "/index.html")
>>> res = conn.getresponse()
>>> print res.status, res.reason
200 OK
>>> print res.getheaders()
[('content-length', '0'), ('expires', '-1'), ('server', 'gws'), ('cache-control', 'private, max-age=0'), ('date', 'Sat, 20 Sep 2008 06:43:36 GMT'), ('content-type', 'text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1')]

There's also a getheader(name) to get a specific header.

Obligatory Requests way:

import requests

resp = requests.head("http://www.google.com")
print resp.status_code, resp.text, resp.headers

I believe the Requests library should be mentioned as well.

Just:

import urllib2
request = urllib2.Request('http://localhost:8080')
request.get_method = lambda : 'HEAD'

response = urllib2.urlopen(request)
response.info().gettype()

Edit: I've just came to realize there is httplib2 :D

import httplib2
h = httplib2.Http()
resp = h.request("http://www.google.com", 'HEAD')
assert resp[0]['status'] == 200
assert resp[0]['content-type'] == 'text/html'
...

link text

For completeness to have a Python3 answer equivalent to the accepted answer using httplib.

It is basically the same code just that the library isn't called httplib anymore but http.client

from http.client import HTTPConnection

conn = HTTPConnection('www.google.com')
conn.request('HEAD', '/index.html')
res = conn.getresponse()

print(res.status, res.reason)

import httplib
import urlparse

def unshorten_url(url):
    parsed = urlparse.urlparse(url)
    h = httplib.HTTPConnection(parsed.netloc)
    h.request('HEAD', parsed.path)
    response = h.getresponse()
    if response.status/100 == 3 and response.getheader('Location'):
        return response.getheader('Location')
    else:
        return url