From: Austin Ziegler <austin@...>
Date: 2003-04-19T11:16:30+09:00
Subject: Re: How to test for text file

On Sat, 19 Apr 2003 01:14:08 +0900, Peter B. Ensch wrote:
> Yukihiro Matsumoto wrote:
>>| In perl, -T <file> returns true if <file> is a text file and -B
>>| <file> returns true if <file> is binary.
>> You have to define what is text file first. Traditional Perl test
>> does not work for Japanese text (nor Unicode text).
> Ah! Not having worked with Unicode before, I had not considered
> this. Does your answer assume that I need to define 'text file'
> and then open/read the file to see if it meets the definition? In
> other words, it is not possible to do something like:
>
> if text file
>   open and process
> else
>   do not open
> end
> 
> BTW, thanks for answering my question, Matz, and thanks for ruby.
> I'm having a lot of fun learning it.

You could use MIME::Types [RAA:mime-types], which does a decent job
of MIME Content-Type analysis, and it knows most extensions for
filee types.

I may port File::MMagic from Perl to do this sort of thing, though.

-austin
-- Austin Ziegler, austin@halostatue.ca on 2003.04.18 at 22:09:30