Getting file timestamp from url

[mhearne808[insert-at-sign-here]gmail[insert-dot-he]

Is is possible to get the timestamp of a file on a web server if it
has a URL?

For example, let's say that I want to know when the following file was
created:

http://www.w3schools.com/xml/note.xml

I can get an HTTPMessage object using urllib2, like this:

-------------------------------------------------------------------
#!/usr/bin/python
import urllib2
url = 'http://www.w3schools.com/xml/note.xml'
f = urllib2.urlopen(url)
finfo = f.info()
-------------------------------------------------------------------

My finfo is an HTTPMessage object, which has getdate() and
getdate_tz() methods. However, they both require a 'name' argument.
I can't figure out what this is...

Am I going down the wrong path? Is there a path I can go down to get
what I want?

Thanks,

Mike

[Tim Roberts]

"mhearne808[insert-at-sign-here]gmail[insert-dot-here]com"
<mh********@gmail.comwrote:

>
Is is possible to get the timestamp of a file on a web server if it
has a URL?

No, not in the general case.

>For example, let's say that I want to know when the following file was
created:

http://www.w3schools.com/xml/note.xml

Remember that the only information that you get back from the server is the
HTTP request. There is a "Last-Modified" header in the HTTP standards that
says when the page was last modified, and Apache is good about sending it,
but that's all you can find out. Plus, remember that web proxies can
interfere with this.
--
Tim Roberts, ti**@probo.com
Providenza & Boekelheide, Inc.