Re: best way to determine (MIME) content type of a stream of bytes?

On Mon, 2010-03-08 at 10:57 -0500, Robert P. J. Day wrote: > hi, i'm interested in the most comprehensive way to determine the > content type of a stream of bytes that's been uploaded to a PHP > script? assuming that the bytes are uploaded simply via a POST > parameter, i can see that there are a couple ways to do it: > > * getimagesize() > * FileInfo > > i've been doing some testing this morning and a few video formats > handed to FileInfo come back as "application/octet-stream" which isn't > particularly informative. and i want to support as many different > formats of image, audio and video as possible. > > so ... what's the best way? oh, by the way, when i used fileinfo, i > didn't bother handing over a magic file. i'm starting to think that > would make a difference. and is there a noticeable advantage to > upgrading to PHP 5.3 since the server (centos 5.4) is currently > running only PHP 5.1.6. thanks. > > rday > -- > > ======================================================================== > Robert P. J. Day Waterloo, Ontario, CANADA > > Linux Consulting, Training and Kernel Pedantry. > > Web page: > http://crashcourse.ca > Twitter: ‘iJ+ǽ > ‘H;Ââc»èhttp://twitter.com/rpjday > ======================================================================== > If you're wanting to grab details about a clip, what about using mplayer for dealing with video clips. It has more than a few command line options that can return various levels of detail about a media file. You could use the extension of the clip as a hint about what way you can determine a files exact type. So, if a file came in with a jpg, png or gif extension, you could use GD functions to determine if it's really an image. If it's a .avi, .mpg, .mp4, .mp3, .ogg, you could use mplayer to deal with it. This does seem to ba a bit of an area where PHP is lacking. Even the manual pages are cryptic. It seems to suggest that the Mime functions which we should use in-place of deprecated ones themselves rely on those same deprecated functions! Having said that, I've had good results from using "file -f filename" on Linux, which is using version 5.03 on my system. Thanks, Ash http://www.ashleysheridan.co.uk