Question

What I’m looking for is something which will take any file extension given to it and return a description of that extension.

For example :

$extension = 'PNG';
$description = ext_description($extension);

echo $description // Outputs 'Portable Network Graphic'

OR

 $extension = 'DOC';
 $description = ext_description($extension);

 echo $description // Outputs 'Microsoft Office Word Document'

I’ve searched google and nothing came up. It would be a huge time saver if anyone knew if such a script existed.

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

Yes there is, one is the getID3 Library and there is the PHP build in fileinfo library.

As the description for everybody is something else, you can create a simple look-up function that works on array data. You only need to add your file-types into the array and you’re done:

function ext_description($extension) {
    static extensions = array(
        'png' => 'Portable Network Graphic',
        'doc' => 'Microsoft Office Word Document'
    );
    $extension = strtolower($extension);
    return isset($extensions[$extension])
        ? $extensions[$extension]
        : sprintf('Unknown File (%s)', $extension)
        ;
}