24

Does Perl6 have something like the Perl5 -T file test to tell if a file is a text file?

jjmerelo
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sid_com
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3 Answers3

23

There's nothing built in, however there is a module Data::TextOrBinary that does that.

use Data::TextOrBinary;
say is-text('/bin/bash'.IO);                            # False
say is-text('/usr/share/dict/words'.IO);                # True
Jonathan Worthington
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11

That's a heuristic that has not been translated to Perl 6. You can simply read it in UTF8 (or ASCII) to do the same:

given slurp("read-utf8.p6", enc => 'utf8') -> $f {
    say "UTF8";
}

(substitute read-utf8.p6 by the name of the file you want to check)

jjmerelo
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    actually, if the file isn't valid utf8, this will throw an exception. also, it won't understand utf16, for example – timotimo Apr 15 '19 at 09:02
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    @timotimo right, but the original one just checked for ASCII or UTF8. A battery of encodings should have to be checked, but the general idea would be the same. – jjmerelo Apr 15 '19 at 09:19
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    @jjmerelo Your comment disagrees with the answer to https://stackoverflow.com/questions/899206/how-does-perl-know-a-file-is-binary – plugwash Apr 15 '19 at 16:43
5

we can make use of the File::Type with the following code.

use strict;
use warnings;

use File::Type;

my $file      = '/path/to/file.ext';
my $ft        = File::Type->new();
my $file_type = $ft->mime_type($file);

if ( $file_type eq 'application/octet-stream' ) {
    # possibly a text file
}
elsif ( $file_type eq 'application/zip' ) {
    # file is a zip archive
}

Source: https://metacpan.org/pod/File::Type

Sandy P. Chaudhry
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