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

Try it with mechanize:

import mechanize
br = mechanize.Browser()
br.set_handle_redirect(False)
try:
 br.open_novisit('http://www.fakedomain.com/fakeImage.jpg')
 print 'OK'
except:
 print 'KO'

Answer 2

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 3

This might be good enough to see if a url to a file exists.

import urllib
if urllib.urlopen('http://www.fakedomain.com/fakeImage.jpg').code == 200:
  print 'File exists'

Answer 4

I think you can try send a http request to the url and read the response.If no exception was caught,it probably exists.