python: check if url to jpg exists

Looks like http://www.fakedomain.com/fakeImage.jpg automatically redirected to http://www.fakedomain.com/index.html without any error.

Redirecting for 301 and 302 responses are automatically done without giving any response back to user.

Please take a look HTTPRedirectHandler, you might need to subclass it to handle that.

Here is the one sample from Dive Into Python:

http://diveintopython3.ep.io/http-web-services.html#redirects

>>> 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).

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

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

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.