Question

Usually I would download it to StringIO object, then run this:

m = magic.Magic()
m.from_buffer(thefile.read(1024))

But this time , I can’t download the file, because the image might be 20 Megabytes. I want to use Python magic to find the file type without downloading the entire file.

If python-magic can’t do it…is the next best way to observe the mime type in the headers? But how accurate is this??

I need accuracy.

Answer 1

You can call read(1024) without downloading the whole file:

thefile = urllib2.urlopen(someURL)

Then, just use your existing code. urlopen returns a file-like object, so this works naturally.