What I'm trying to do here is get the headers of a given URL so I can determine the MIME type. I want to be able to see if http://somedomain/foo/ will return an HTML document or a JPEG image for example. Thus, I need to figure out how to send a HEAD request so that I can read the MIME type without having to download the content. Does anyone know of an easy way of doing this?
As an aside, when using the httplib (at least on 2.5.2), trying to read the response of a HEAD request will block (on readline) and subsequently fail.  If you do not issue read on the response, you are unable to send another request on the connection, you will need to open a new one.  Or accept a long delay between requests.
How do you send a HEAD HTTP request in Python 2?