Question

I’m using curl to download different files (e.g .doc, .jpg, jpeg , docx etc) from a webmail so I would like to know how find this extension because the link that I’m using(e.g example.com/file=3838438) basically outputs the file content but there is no file extension specified in the link.

Answer 1

You probably want the MIME types, not the extension (which is unreliable). The MIME type is a portable way to identify the file type. Examples are image/jpeg and text/html.

First, check whether that site tells you the mime type in the HTTP response. You want to look for the Content-Type header.

If that isn’t useful, you can use finfo_file or finfo_buffer to guess mime types. These are available from PECL, or in PHP 5.3 and later.

In older versions of PHP, you can use mime_content_type.