kieranbarnes do you know where your towel is?

Detecting MIME types in PHP

Detecting MIME types in PHP used to be hellish.

Use the mime_content_type function I hear you say. Returns the MIME content type for a file as determined by using information from the magic.mime file. No, its garbage and thankfully now depreciated.

The PHP documentation suggests we use the Fileinfo PECL extension. I wasted ten minutes of my day trying to make that work. It even comes packaged with PHP 5.3. Still doesn't work. PEAR to the rescue. Again.

pear install MIME_Type

Here's how I detect a MIME Type

<?php
require_once 'MIME/Type.php';
 
$filename = '/path/to/some/file.jpg';
echo MIME_Type::autoDetect($filename);
?>

You can even do clevererer things like;

• getMedia() returns the main part (media part, portion before the slash) of a MIME type. It would return image for image/png.
• getSubType() returns the subtype of the given type. For image/png, it returns png.

So, until PHP sorts itself out by making the built in PECL code work, first time, trust PEAR.

Here's the none working PECL based code for reference

<?php
$finfo = finfo_open(FILEINFO_MIME_TYPE);
foreach (glob("*") as $filename) {
    echo finfo_file($finfo, $filename) . "\n";
}
finfo_close($finfo);
?>

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