HEAD method - Python requests

Requests library is one of the important aspects of Python for making HTTP requests to a specified URL. This article revolves around how one can make HEAD request to a specified URL using requests.head() method. Before checking out the HEAD method, let's figure out what a Http HEAD request is -

HEAD Http Method

HEAD is a request method supported by HTTP used by the World Wide Web. The HEAD method asks for a response identical to that of a GET request, but without the response body. This is useful for retrieving meta-information written in response headers, without having to transport the entire content.

How to make HEAD request through Python Requests

Python's requests module provides in-built method called head() for making a HEAD request to a specified URI. Syntax -

requests.head(url, params={key: value}, args)

Example - Let's try making a request to httpbin's APIs for example purposes. Python3

import requests

# Making a HEAD request
r = requests.head('https://httpbin.org/', data ={'key':'value'})

# check status code for response received
# success code - 200
print(r)

# print headers of request
print(r.headers)

# checking if request contains any content
print(r.content)

save this file as request.py and through terminal run,

python request.py

Output -

Advanced with HEAD request

The metainformation contained in the HTTP headers in response to a HEAD request SHOULD be identical to the information sent in response to a GET request. This method can be used for obtaining metainformation about the entity implied by the request without transferring the entity-body itself. This method is often used for testing hypertext links for validity, accessibility, and recent modification. The response to a HEAD request MAY be cacheable in the sense that the information contained in the response MAY be used to update a previously cached entity from that resource. If the new field values indicate that the cached entity differs from the current entity (as would be indicated by a change in Content-Length, Content-MD5, ETag or Last-Modified), then the cache MUST treat the cache entry as stale.