Is there an easy way to request a URL in python and NOT follow redirects?

Looking at the source of urllib2 it looks like the easiest way to do it would be to subclass HTTPRedirectHandler and then use build_opener to override the default HTTPRedirectHandler, but this seems like a lot of (relatively complicated) work to do what seems like it should be pretty simple.

Here is the Requests way:

import requests
r = requests.get('http://github.com', allow_redirects=False)
print(r.status_code, r.headers['Location'])

Dive Into Python has a good chapter on handling redirects with urllib2. Another solution is httplib.

>>> import httplib
>>> conn = httplib.HTTPConnection("www.bogosoft.com")
>>> conn.request("GET", "")
>>> r1 = conn.getresponse()
>>> print r1.status, r1.reason
301 Moved Permanently
>>> print r1.getheader('Location')
http://www.bogosoft.com/new/location

This is a urllib2 handler that will not follow redirects:

class NoRedirectHandler(urllib2.HTTPRedirectHandler):
    def http_error_302(self, req, fp, code, msg, headers):
        infourl = urllib.addinfourl(fp, headers, req.get_full_url())
        infourl.status = code
        infourl.code = code
        return infourl
    http_error_300 = http_error_302
    http_error_301 = http_error_302
    http_error_303 = http_error_302
    http_error_307 = http_error_302

opener = urllib2.build_opener(NoRedirectHandler())
urllib2.install_opener(opener)

The redirections keyword in the httplib2 request method is a red herring. Rather than return the first request it will raise a RedirectLimit exception if it receives a redirection status code. To return the inital response you need to set follow_redirects to False on the Http object:

import httplib2
h = httplib2.Http()
h.follow_redirects = False
(response, body) = h.request("http://example.com")

i suppose this would help

from httplib2 import Http
def get_html(uri,num_redirections=0): # put it as 0 for not to follow redirects
conn = Http()
return conn.request(uri,redirections=num_redirections)

I second olt's pointer to Dive into Python. Here's an implementation using urllib2 redirect handlers, more work than it should be? Maybe, shrug.

import sys
import urllib2

class RedirectHandler(urllib2.HTTPRedirectHandler):
	def http_error_301(self, req, fp, code, msg, headers):  
		result = urllib2.HTTPRedirectHandler.http_error_301( 
			self, req, fp, code, msg, headers)              
		result.status = code                                 
		raise Exception("Permanent Redirect: %s" % 301)

	def http_error_302(self, req, fp, code, msg, headers):
		result = urllib2.HTTPRedirectHandler.http_error_302(
			self, req, fp, code, msg, headers)              
		result.status = code                                
		raise Exception("Temporary Redirect: %s" % 302)

def main(script_name, url):
   opener = urllib2.build_opener(RedirectHandler)
   urllib2.install_opener(opener)
   print urllib2.urlopen(url).read()

if __name__ == "__main__":
	main(*sys.argv) 

The shortest way however is

class NoRedirect(urllib2.HTTPRedirectHandler):
    def redirect_request(self, req, fp, code, msg, hdrs, newurl):
        pass
        
noredir_opener = urllib2.build_opener(NoRedirect())