How can I make a HEAD request using the Requests library?

In Python, the requests library allows you to send HTTP requests with ease. To make a HEAD request, you can use the head function provided by the library. A HEAD request is similar to a GET request, but it doesn't return the body of the request. It is typically used to retrieve the headers from a resource, which can be useful for checking the existence of a resource, its size, or the type without downloading the entire content.

Here's an example of how to make a HEAD request using the requests library in Python:

import requests

# The URL you want to send a HEAD request to
url = 'http://example.com'

# Perform the HEAD request
response = requests.head(url)

# Check the status code of the response
print(f'Status code: {response.status_code}')

# Print the headers of the response
print(f'Headers: {response.headers}')

In the above code:

1. You import the requests library.
2. You define the URL to which you want to send the HEAD request.
3. You use requests.head() to send the HEAD request to the specified URL.
4. You print the status code and the headers of the response to the console.

Note that the response.headers will contain a CaseInsensitiveDict object, which is a dictionary that allows case-insensitive access to the HTTP response headers.

If you need to include additional headers with your HEAD request, you can pass them in using the headers parameter like so:

headers = {
    'User-Agent': 'My User Agent',
    'Accept': 'text/html',
}

response = requests.head(url, headers=headers)

Always remember to handle possible exceptions that could occur when making HTTP requests, such as ConnectionError, Timeout, and HTTPError. To catch these exceptions, you can use a try-except block:

try:
    response = requests.head(url)
    # Process the response here
except requests.exceptions.RequestException as e:
    # Handle the exception
    print(f'An error occurred: {e}')

By using the requests library's head function as shown above, you can make HEAD requests in Python quickly and efficiently.