I'm trying to extract the response header of a URL request. When I use firebug to analyze the response output of a URL request, it returns:
Content-Type text/html
However when I use the python code:
urllib2.urlopen(URL).info()
the resulting output returns:
Content-Type: video/x-flv
I am new to python, and to web programming in general; any helpful insight is much appreciated. Also, if more info is needed please let me know.
Thanks in advance for reading this post
Try to request as Firefox does. You can see the request headers in Firebug, so add them to your request object:
import urllib2
request = urllib2.Request('http://your.tld/...')
request.add_header('User-Agent', 'some fake agent string')
request.add_header('Referer', 'fake referrer')
...
response = urllib2.urlopen(request)
# check content type:
print response.info().getheader('Content-Type')
There's also HTTPCookieProcessor which can make it better, but I don't think you'll need it in most cases. Have a look at python's documentation:
response.info()["content-type"]
Content-Type text/html
Really, like that, without the colon?
If so, that might explain it: it's an invalid header, so it gets ignored, so urllib guesses the content-type instead, by looking at the filename. If the URL happens to have ‘.flv’ at the end, it'll guess the type should be video/x-flv.
This peculiar discrepancy might be explained by different headers (maybe ones of the accept kind) being sent by the two requests -- can you check that...? Or, if Javascript is running in Firefox (which I assume you're using when you're running firebug?) -- since it's definitely NOT running in the Python case -- "all bets are off", as they say;-).
Keep in mind that a web server can return different results for the same URL based on differences in the request. For example, content-type negotiation: the requestor can specify a list of content-types it will accept, and the server can return different results to try to accomodate different needs.
Also, you may be getting an error page for one of your requests, for example, because it is malformed, or you don't have cookies set that authenticate you properly, etc. Look at the response itself to see what you are getting.
according to http://docs.python.org/library/urllib2.html there is only get_header() method and nothing about getheader .
Asking because Your code works fine for
response.info().getheader('Set cookie')
but once i execute
response.info().get_header('Set cookie')
i get:
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "baza.py", line 11, in <module>
cookie = response.info().get_header('Set-Cookie')
AttributeError: HTTPMessage instance has no attribute 'get_header'
edit:
Moreover
response.headers.get('Set-Cookie') works fine as well, not mentioned in urlib2 doc....
for getting raw data for the headers in python2, a little bit of a hack but it works.
"".join(urllib2.urlopen("http://google.com/").info().__dict__["headers"])
basically "".join(list) will the list of headers, which all include "\n" at the end.
__dict__ is a built in python variable for all dicts, basically you can select a list out of a 2d array with it.
and ofcourse ["headers"] is selecting the list value from the .info() response value dict
hope this helped you learn a few ez python tricks :)
