Bugfix for Curl.head

[ruafozy]

No description provided.

[deltheil]

I faced the same issue while I was answering a question on SO (that's why I omitted the Curl.head shortcut in my answer).

Behind the scenes, this patch is equivalent to:

curl_easy_setopt(curl, CURLOPT_CUSTOMREQUEST, "HEAD");

If we refer to libcurl documentation, we can see the recommended way to perform a HEAD request is as follow:

To switch to a proper HEAD use CURLOPT_NOBODY, [...].

Since this is precisely what http_head does, I would suggest tweaking this patch by modifying the self.http as follow:

def self.http(verb, url, post_body=nil, put_data=nil, &block)
  handle = Curl::Easy.new(url)
  handle.post_body = post_body if post_body
  handle.put_data = put_data if put_data
  yield handle if block_given?
  verb == :HEAD ? handle.http_head : handle.http(verb)
  handle
end

In other words, do an explicit http_head call when appropriate.

Feel free to let me know if you want me to submit a new pull request with this small tweak.

Note: on my own this behaves better since I've observed that curl could hang and raise an error (e.g with the request below) with this CURLOPT_CUSTOMREQUEST approach:

> h = Curl.head("http://www.google.com")
Curl::Err::PartialFileError: Curl::Err::PartialFileError

Reproduced on Mac OS X 10.6.8 with libcurl 7.19.7, the (old!) version shipped with the Mac.