Hi nitin, 

 It would return Content-Length as the main application of using HEAD is for proxies to find if the cached copy can be used or not, availability of Content-Length is mandatory to do those kind of checks. In any case you must be getting a redirection maybe 301, 302 in status code so you would need to follow the location. 

For example I just tried looking for header info on http://facebook.com/login.php and I got a redirection 301 to www.facebook.com/login.php and in that location u would receive content-length. 

I used this tool : http://www.rexswain.com/httpview.html 

First try with www.facebook.com/login.php and it would give u content-Length in first hit ( do not forget to use HEAD as method type)

Then try with http://facebook.com/login.php and auto follow enabled and this time u would get it in the location 2. 

Cheers
Dipen



On Sun, Dec 6, 2009 at 9:08 PM, nitin gupta <nitingupta.iitg@gmail.com> wrote:
Thanks Dipen, It works perfectly well. Thanks for making me aware of the HEAD method.

The headers does not contain "content-length" when invoked on a .php page, is this in accordance with the protocol?


--
Regards,
Nitin Kumar Gupta
http://publicmind.in/blog/


On Sun, Dec 6, 2009 at 8:46 PM, Dipen <dipench@gmail.com> wrote:
I havent tried it doing it with drupal but try passing method = HEAD.

HEAD /index.html 

would fetch only headers of that resource, where as GET for instance would also return the content.

Cheers
dipen 




On Sun, Dec 6, 2009 at 7:52 PM, nitin gupta <nitingupta.iitg@gmail.com> wrote:
Hi,

I am currently using curl (CURLOPT_NOBODY) to exclude the body and to just get the headers returned by the sever for a http request. I am specifically interested in the return status code and the content length. Can I do it using drupal_http_request? What will be the suitable value for the $headers, so that I don't need to download the whole page?

http://api.drupal.org/api/function/drupal_http_request/6

--
Regards,
Nitin Kumar Gupta
http://publicmind.in/blog/