# Download only http headers **URL:** \ **Category:** Ruby\ **Created:** [November 30, 2006, 1:32am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/download-only-http-headers/77727 "2006-11-30T01:32:04Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 3\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![nguyen](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/n/eb8c5e/32.png) [@nguyen](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/nguyen)\ **Post date:** [November 30, 2006, 1:32am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/download-only-http-headers/77727/1 "2006-11-30T01:32:04Z")
Hi folks, I’m writing a small app which needs to list all HTML pages (only HTML pages, no image, no CSS, pdf, gif etc.) from a starting page. Given any link, I use Net::HTTP to download the content and examine the content-type header in order to determine whether it is a HTML page or s/t else (I don’t think pattern matching will work because there are dynamic pages being able to return arbitrary resources [HTML, images etc.]); however, I cannot find anyway to only read the headers without reading the whole contents of that resource (e.g. a PDF). That would make my app perform very slowly while all I want is just listing the HTML pages. Does anyone have any suggestion as to how this problem can be solved? Thanks in advance Nguyen ---
**Author:** ![nguyen](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/n/eb8c5e/32.png) [@nguyen](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/nguyen)\ **Post date:** [November 30, 2006, 1:46am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/download-only-http-headers/77727/2 "2006-11-30T01:46:05Z")
Nguyen wrote: > Net::HTTP has the ability to do HEAD commands in addition to GET. You can get the headers that way. Tom ---
**Author:** ![nguyen](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/n/eb8c5e/32.png) [@nguyen](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/nguyen)\ **Post date:** [November 30, 2006, 3:10am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/download-only-http-headers/77727/3 "2006-11-30T03:10:17Z")
Work like charm. Thanks a great deal, Tom. Nguyen