Feature request: Check if repo / file exists

Hi, not sure if these functions are already implement, but I was not able to find them. It would be nice to have the following two methods:

• a function that checks if a repository exists. I provide a name, it checks if huggingface.co/[model_name] exists. Returns True / False.
• a function that checks if a specific file in a repository exists. For sentence-transformers, I check if there is a sentence-transformers specific file (modules.json) in that repositoryand depending on it I execute different code. Currently I do this with cached_download(url_to_modules_json_file) and catching a 404 exception. But having a function that just checks if the file exists (without downloading) and return True / False would have been nice.

[julien-c]

yes, we return a 404 (cc @Pierrci)

[nreimers]

I am also wondering what the response would be for a private model if the user is not authenticated? 404 or 401 Unauthorized?

404 would be more secure (so you cannot probe names from privat models), 401 Unauthorized would be more informative for users.

Not sure which one is the fastest compared to getting and checking the list from hf_api.list_models()

The hf_api.list_models() approach will not scale, e.g. once there are 100k models, the names for 100k models must be downloaded just to check if one name exists. So I think the 404 approach is much nicer.