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Video

HEAD requests

A HTTP request starts with a “method”, and code we’ve written so far in this series (for example the simplest and receive data episodes) have only used GET which is the method used for retriving data.

Another well used and useful HTTP method is HEAD. HEAD is similar to GET in many regards and the server should send back identical response headers as to a GET for the same resources, but a HEAD never gets any data back. There’s no response body to a HEAD request, which is also a reason why the libcurl for this is called CURLOPT_NOBODY!

You tell libcurl you want a HEAD request by setting the CURLOPT_NOBODY option to curl_easy_setopt().

(The CURLOPT_NOBODY option incidentally also works fine for other protocols than HTTP when you want to get the headers or meta-data only but avoid transferring a response body.)

setup

Using the Makefile from the setup episode, we build the program and test it.