Search code examples
httphttp-headershttpresponsecontent-disposition

Detecting if a URL is a file download

How can I detect if a given URL is a file to be downloaded?

I came across the content-disposition header, however it seems that this isn't a part of http 1.1 directly.

Is there a more standard way to detect if the response for a GET request made to a given URL is actually a file to/can be downloaded?

That is the response is not html or json or anything similar, but something like an image, mp3, pdf file etc.?

Solution

  • I ended up using the content-type to decide if it's an html file or some other type of file that is on the other end of a given URL.

    I'm using the content-disposition header content to detect the original file name if it exists since the header isn't available everywhere.