What’s the best way to get an HTTP response code from a URL?

Here's a solution that uses httplib instead.

import httplib

def get_status_code(host, path="/"):
    """ This function retreives the status code of a website by requesting
        HEAD data from the host. This means that it only requests the headers.
        If the host cannot be reached or something else goes wrong, it returns
        None instead.
    """
    try:
        conn = httplib.HTTPConnection(host)
        conn.request("HEAD", path)
        return conn.getresponse().status
    except StandardError:
        return None


print get_status_code("stackoverflow.com") # prints 200
print get_status_code("stackoverflow.com", "/nonexistant") # prints 404

You should use urllib2, like this:

import urllib2
for url in ["http://entrian.com/", "http://entrian.com/does-not-exist/"]:
    try:
        connection = urllib2.urlopen(url)
        print connection.getcode()
        connection.close()
    except urllib2.HTTPError, e:
        print e.getcode()

# Prints:
# 200 [from the try block]
# 404 [from the except block]

Addressing @Niklas R's comment to @nickanor's answer:

from urllib.error import HTTPError
import urllib.request

def getResponseCode(url):
    try:
        conn = urllib.request.urlopen(url)
        return conn.getcode()
    except HTTPError as e:
        return e.code

It depends on multiple factories, but try to test these methods:

import requests

def url_code_status(url):
    try:
        response = requests.head(url, allow_redirects=False)
        return response.status_code
    except Exception as e:
        print(f'[ERROR]: {e}')

or:

import http.client as httplib
import urllib.parse

def url_code_status(url):
    try:
        protocol, host, path, query, fragment = urllib.parse.urlsplit(url)
        if protocol == "http":
            conntype = httplib.HTTPConnection
        elif protocol == "https":
            conntype = httplib.HTTPSConnection
        else:
            raise ValueError("unsupported protocol: " + protocol)
        conn = conntype(host)
        conn.request("HEAD", path)
        resp = conn.getresponse()
        conn.close()
        return resp.status
    except Exception as e:
        print(f'[ERROR]: {e}')

Benchmark results for 100 URLs:

• First method: 20.90 seconds
• Second method: 23.15 seconds