如何在不获取主体的情况下仅使用HTTP GET请求获取标头

Question

Is there an opportunity to make http get request, read headers and not fetching body in order to reduce traffic and increase speed? I use this code:

HttpWebRequest request = (HttpWebRequest)HttpWebRequest.Create(u1);
        request.AllowAutoRedirect = true;
        request.Timeout = 30000;
        request.Method = "GET";
        request.UserAgent = "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/49.0.2623.110 Safari/537.36";
        request.KeepAlive = true;
        HttpWebResponse response;

        using (response = (HttpWebResponse)request.GetResponse())
        {
            var res = response.ResponseUri.ToString();
        }

So I need only the result url. If there is a redirection (Location header) - I will get the result url. But I don't need the body. Is it real to get response with GET method (not HEAD method) to get the result without the response body?

Answer 1

Using GET on a resource that returns a body implies that you want to get the body. HEAD is designed exactly for what you're seeking, assuming the server resource supports it.

If server doesn't support HEAD , you could potentially play with Range header to just request a few bytes, but that also depends on resource supporting it, and is kind of a hack.

Answer 2

You can use Headers property of HttpRequest

response.Headers

to get the headers for the response.