What should I use to detect mimetypes reliably?

Question

I tried using mimetype-fu to detect mimetypes, but it seems to work for some files, while for others it doesn't. For example, I downloaded this R manual, and I tried to detect it's mimetype, via:

File.mime_type?(File.read("R-intro.pdf"))

and it tells me that the mimetype is "unknown/unknown". Is there another way of detecting mimetypes? Is there maybe another mimetype-fu option that I'm not aware of, that could handle this case?

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4600679/detect-mime-type-of-uploaded-file-in-ruby — apneadiving, Aug 23 '12 at 15:26
http://api.rubyonrails.org/classes/Mime/Type.html#method-c-lookup_by_extension — apneadiving, Aug 23 '12 at 15:26
As far as I can see, the project hasn't been updated for the past 2 years, I'll give it a try though. I don't want to stick to using extensions to guessing mimetypes. — Geo, Aug 23 '12 at 16:35
@apneadiving, I tried `filemagic`, it did the job. Add an answer, I'll mark it! — Geo, Aug 24 '12 at 10:50

apneadiving · Accepted Answer · 2012-08-27T09:13:19.097

1

As discussed in comments, filemagic is a good fit.

edited Aug 27 '12 at 09:13

answered Aug 23 '12 at 15:21

apneadiving

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What should I use to detect mimetypes reliably?

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