Download only http headers

[Nguyen]

Hi folks,

I'm writing a small app which needs to list all HTML pages (only HTML
pages, no image, no CSS, pdf, gif etc.) from a starting page. Given
any link, I use Net::HTTP to download the content and examine the
content-type header in order to determine whether it is a HTML page or
s/t else (I don't think pattern matching will work because there are
dynamic pages being able to return arbitrary resources [HTML, images
etc.]); however, I cannot find anyway to only read the headers without
reading the whole contents of that resource (e.g. a PDF). That would
make my app perform very slowly while all I want is just listing the
HTML pages.

Does anyone have any suggestion as to how this problem can be solved?

Thanks in advance

Nguyen

 

[Tom Werner]

I'm writing a small app which needs to list all HTML pages (only HTML
pages, no image, no CSS, pdf, gif etc.) from a starting page. Given
any link, I use Net::HTTP to download the content and examine the
content-type header in order to determine whether it is a HTML page or
s/t else (I don't think pattern matching will work because there are
dynamic pages being able to return arbitrary resources [HTML, images
etc.]); however, I cannot find anyway to only read the headers without
reading the whole contents of that resource (e.g. a PDF). That would
make my app perform very slowly while all I want is just listing the
HTML pages.

Net::HTTP has the ability to do HEAD commands in addition to GET. You
can get the headers that way.

Tom

 

[Nguyen]

Work like charm. Thanks a great deal, Tom.

Nguyen

I'm writing a small app which needs to list all HTML pages (only HTML
pages, no image, no CSS, pdf, gif etc.) from a starting page. Given
any link, I use Net::HTTP to download the content and examine the
content-type header in order to determine whether it is a HTML page or
s/t else (I don't think pattern matching will work because there are
dynamic pages being able to return arbitrary resources [HTML, images
etc.]); however, I cannot find anyway to only read the headers without
reading the whole contents of that resource (e.g. a PDF). That would
make my app perform very slowly while all I want is just listing the
HTML pages.

Net::HTTP has the ability to do HEAD commands in addition to GET. You
can get the headers that way.

Tom