How to check if URL contains XML file or not?

Question

I have a project about getting XML files from URL's, scraping them, pulling the data, then processing it. Also, I am creating the URL with user input. But I need to check if the URL contains XML file to scrape. Any ideas how to do that? So basically how to check if URL contains XML file or not?

Answer 1

Ways to know whether GETing a URL will retrieve XML...

Before retrieving the file

• Have an out-of-band guarantee.
• Inspect Content-Type HTTP header of response to a HEAD request ¹ .

After retrieving the file

• Inspect Content-Type HTTP header of the response ¹ .
• Sniff root element.
• Files.probeContentType(path)
• Parse via conforming XML parser without getting any well-formedness errors.

Note: Only parsing via a conforming XML parser is guaranteed to provide 100% determination.

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¹ MIME assignments for XML data :

• application/xml (RFC 7303, previously RFC 3023)
• text/xml (RFC 7303, previously RFC 3023)
• Other MIME assignments used with XML applications.