Question

I succeeded to find the extended file type of a specified file ( JPEG image, TIFF Image, …) but I am looking for something more generic that can categorize files in “big cathegories” like images, moovies, text files, …
It there a way to acheive this in cocoa (or objective-c) ?

Thanks for your help,

Answer 1

You could use Uniform Type Identifiers. Since UTIs are organised into hierarchies, one possibility is to check whether the preferred UTI for a given file conforms to a top-level UTI, e.g. public.image for images or public.movie for movies. The Core Services framework includes functions that operate on UTIs as well as constants representing known UTIs.

For instance, working on file name extensions:

NSString *file = @"…"; // path to some file
CFStringRef fileExtension = (CFStringRef) [file pathExtension];
CFStringRef fileUTI = UTTypeCreatePreferredIdentifierForTag(kUTTagClassFilenameExtension, fileExtension, NULL);

if (UTTypeConformsTo(fileUTI, kUTTypeImage)) NSLog(@"It's an image");
else if (UTTypeConformsTo(fileUTI, kUTTypeMovie)) NSLog(@"It's a movie");
else if (UTTypeConformsTo(fileUTI, kUTTypeText)) NSLog(@"It's text");

CFRelease(fileUTI);

If you have a MIME type instead of a file name extension, you can use kUTTagClassMIMEType instead of kUTTagClassFilenameExtension.

For a list of known UTIs, see this document.