requests: Retrieve final URL redirection without GET

Question

Per documentation of requests.get we have:

• https://requests.readthedocs.io/en/master/user/quickstart/#redirection-and-history

By default Requests will perform location redirection for all verbs except HEAD.

So how would one write the following function without the actual GET operation (I discard the content anyway):

def get_location(url):
  response = requests.get(url) # HTML content is discarded
  return response.url

I did verify using curl -I a HEAD operation seems to contains the new location:

$ curl -I 'https://www.example.org/redirect.php?val=1'
HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
Cache-Control: private
Content-Length: 0
Content-Type: text/html
Location: https://www.acme.corp/foobar.html
...

Answer 1

Right after posting my question, I stumble upon:

• https://stackoverflow.com/a/9967683/136285

So this worked for me:

def get_location(url):
  response = requests.head(url, allow_redirects=True)
  return response.url