Home/ Questions/Q 7979393
In Process

The Archive Base Latest Questions

Editorial Team
  • 0
Asked: 2026-06-04T09:45:59+00:00

Detecting the MIME type of a file with PHP is trivial – just use

  • 0

Detecting the MIME type of a file with PHP is trivial – just use PEAR’s MIME_Type package, PHP’s fileinfo or call file -i on a Unix machine.
This works really well for binary files and all others that have some kind of “magic bytes” through which they can be detected easily.

What I’m failing at is detecting the correct MIME type of plain text files:

  • CSS
  • Diff
  • INI (configuration)
  • Javascript
  • rST
  • SQL

All of them are identified as “text/plain”, which is correct, but too unspecific for me. I need the real type, even if it costs some time to analyze the file content.

So my question: Which solutions exist to detect the MIME type of such plain text files? Any Libraries? Code snippets?

Note that I neither have a filename nor a file extension, but I have the file content.

If I used ruby, I could integrate github’s linguist. Ohloh’s ohcount is written in C, but has a command line tool to detect the type: ohcount -d $file

What I’ve tried

ohcount

Detects xml and php files correctly, all other not.

Apache tika

Detects xml and html, all other tests files were only seen as text/plain.

Share

Leave an answer

You must login to add an answer.

Need An Account,

1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Since I didn’t find a proper library, I wrote my own magic file that detects all of my test files properly.

    My application first tries my custom magic file for detection and falls back to the normal/system magic file if no type is detected.

    The code it on github, see https://github.com/cweiske/MIME_Type_PlainDetect .
    The magic file is at data/programming.magic and can be used with file -f programming.magic /path/to/source

    • 0