For Python 2.x
urllib, urllib2 or httplib can be used here. However note, urllib and urllib2 uses httplib. Therefore, depending on whether you plan to do this check a lot (1000s of times), it would be better to use httplib. Additional documentation and examples are here.
Example code:
import httplib
try:
h = httplib.HTTPConnection("www.google.com")
h.connect()
except Exception as ex:
print "Could not connect to page."
For Python 3.x
A similar story to urllib (or urllib2) and httplib from Python 2.x applies to the urllib2 and http.client libraries in Python 3.x. Again, http.client should be quicker. For more documentation and examples look here.
Example code:
import http.client
try:
conn = http.client.HTTPConnection("www.google.com")
conn.connect()
except Exception as ex:
print("Could not connect to page.")
and if you wanted to check the status codes you would need to replace
conn.connect()
with
conn.request("GET", "/index.html") # Could also use "HEAD" instead of "GET".
res = conn.getresponse()
if res.status == 200 or res.status == 302: # Specify codes here.
print("Page Found!")
Note, in both examples, if you would like to catch the specific exception relating to when the URL doesn't exist, rather than all of them, catch the socket.gaierror exception instead (see the socket documentation).