python: check if url to jpg exists

Question

In python, how would I check if a url ending in .jpg exists?

ex: http://www.fakedomain.com/fakeImage.jpg

thanks

Answer 1

The code below is equivalent to tikiboy's answer, but using a high-level and easy-to-use requests library.

import requests

def exists(path):
    r = requests.head(path)
    return r.status_code == requests.codes.ok

print exists('http://www.fakedomain.com/fakeImage.jpg')

The requests.codes.ok equals 200, so you can substitute the exact status code if you wish.

requests.head may throw an exception if server doesn't respond, so you might want to add a try-except construct.

Also if you want to include codes 301 and 302, consider code 303 too, especially if you dereference URIs that denote resources in Linked Data. A URI may represent a person, but you can't download a person, so the server will redirect you to a page that describes this person using 303 redirect.

Answer 2

>>> import httplib
>>>
>>> def exists(site, path):
...     conn = httplib.HTTPConnection(site)
...     conn.request('HEAD', path)
...     response = conn.getresponse()
...     conn.close()
...     return response.status == 200
...
>>> exists('http://www.fakedomain.com', '/fakeImage.jpg')
False

If the status is anything other than a 200, the resource doesn't exist at the URL. This doesn't mean that it's gone altogether. If the server returns a 301 or 302, this means that the resource still exists, but at a different URL. To alter the function to handle this case, the status check line just needs to be changed to return response.status in (200, 301, 302).

Answer 3

thanks for all the responses everyone, ended up using the following:

try:
  f = urllib2.urlopen(urllib2.Request(url))
  deadLinkFound = False
except:
  deadLinkFound = True