Get remote file size via HTTP without downloading said file.

Question

Any way to get the size of a (remote, http) file without actually downloading it?

All other similar questions seem to revolve around grabbing the expectedContentLength from the NSURLResponse object in didReceiveResponse: but I don't want to download the file, I just want to know how big it is.

Answer 1

Try to make HEAD request, it returns only headers with Content-Length header included.

~$ curl -I http://google.com/
HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
Location: http://www.google.com/
Content-Length: 219
...