Getting link attachment

[J Lalit]

Hi,

I have a requirement that states extraction of links in body of some content.I have achieved it but stuck up in verifying whether a given HTTP link in content is a simple link to a page/site or it is an attachment?

I did enough googling but no success!!!

Any idea or link or piece of code?

Thanks & Regards,
Lalit

[Steve Luke]

To get it right you pretty much need to send a request to the URL and read the CONTENT-TYPE header. You may be able to get away with sending a HEAD request to the site, which would ask the server to only respond with the headers for a particular page. You would send the request, read the CONTENT-TYPE response, and based on that determine the type of link.

More on HTTP methods (including the HEAD method)
HttpURLConnection API, Tutorial on URLConnections
Example of reading Headers with URLConnection

[J Lalit]

Hi,

Thanks for reply.How can i differentiate that a particular link is a normal HTTP link or an attachment.Does this work:

   
URL url = Some arbitrary URL;
URLConnection urlc = url.openConnection();
urlc.getHeaderField("Content-Type"); //It will return particular Content type

For normal Link

  urlc.getHeaderField("Content-Type");  

will return "text/html".
For an attachment

  urlc.getHeaderField("Content-Type");  

will return application/type where type can be MSWORD,PDF etc.

Does this formula hold true always?

[Henry Wong]

Well, it depends on what you define as a "normal link". Are HTML pages the only thing you consider as a normal link? What about regular text pages (text/plain) ? What about xml pages (text/xml)?

The list of possible content types is actually pretty big. And growing. You need to decide where to draw the line.


BTW.... did a quick google.... http://www.iana.org/assignments/media-types/

Henry