Python bindings to libmagic
All the different answers on this topic are very confusing, so I’m hoping to give a bit more clarity with this overview of the different bindings of libmagic. Previously mammadori gave a short answer listing the available option.
libmagic
When determining a files mime-type, the tool of choice is simply called file
and its back-end is called libmagic
. (See the Project home page.) The project is developed in a private cvs-repository, but there is a read-only git mirror on github.
Now this tool, which you will need if you want to use any of the libmagic bindings with python, already comes with its own python bindings called file-magic
. There is not much dedicated documentation for them, but you can always have a look at the man page of the c-library: man libmagic
. The basic usage is described in the readme file:
import magic
detected = magic.detect_from_filename('magic.py')
print 'Detected MIME type: {}'.format(detected.mime_type)
print 'Detected encoding: {}'.format(detected.encoding)
print 'Detected file type name: {}'.format(detected.name)
Apart from this, you can also use the library by creating a Magic
object using magic.open(flags)
as shown in the example file.
Both toivotuo and ewr2san use these file-magic
bindings included in the file
tool. They mistakenly assume, they are using the python-magic
package. This seems to indicate, that if both file
and python-magic
are installed, the python module magic
refers to the former one.
python-magic
This is the library that Simon Zimmermann talks about in his answer and which is also employed by Claude COULOMBE as well as Gringo Suave.
filemagic
Note: This project was last updated in 2013!
Due to being based on the same c-api, this library has some similarity with file-magic
included in libmagic
. It is only mentioned by mammadori and no other answer employs it.