binaryornot 0.2.0

Status

It works, and I’m using this package in various places. But it doesn’t cover all edge cases yet.

The code could be improved. Pull requests welcome! As of now, it is based on these snippets, but that may change:

• http://stackoverflow.com/questions/898669/how-can-i-detect-if-a-file-is-binary-non-text-in-python

• http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1446549/how-to-identify-binary-and-text-files-using-python

• http://code.activestate.com/recipes/173220/

• http://eli.thegreenplace.net/2011/10/19/perls-guess-if-file-is-text-or-binary-implemented-in-python/

Features

Has tests for these file types:

• Text: .css, .json, .txt, .svg

• Binary: .eot, .otf, ttf, .woff, .png, .jpg, .tiff, .bmp

Why?

You may be thinking, “I can write this in 2 lines of code?!”

It’s actually not that easy. Here’s a great article about how perldoc’s heuristic to guess file types works: http://eli.thegreenplace.net/2011/10/19/perls-guess-if-file-is-text-or-binary-implemented-in-python/

Also, this package saves you from having to write and thoroughly test those 2 lines of code with all sorts of weird file types, cross-platform.

Credits

• Special thanks to Eli Bendersky (@eliben) for his writeup explaining the heuristic and his implementation, which this is largely based on.

• Source code from Perl’s pp_fttext: https://github.com/mirrors/perl/blob/blead/pp_sys.c#L3287

History