Skip to main content

File identification library for Python

Project description

identify

Build Status Azure DevOps coverage pre-commit.ci status PyPI version

File identification library for Python.

Given a file (or some information about a file), return a set of standardized tags identifying what the file is.

Installation

pip install identify

Usage

With a file on disk

If you have an actual file on disk, you can get the most information possible (a superset of all other methods):

>>> from identify import identify
>>> identify.tags_from_path('/path/to/file.py')
{'file', 'text', 'python', 'non-executable'}
>>> identify.tags_from_path('/path/to/file-with-shebang')
{'file', 'text', 'shell', 'bash', 'executable'}
>>> identify.tags_from_path('/bin/bash')
{'file', 'binary', 'executable'}
>>> identify.tags_from_path('/path/to/directory')
{'directory'}
>>> identify.tags_from_path('/path/to/symlink')
{'symlink'}

When using a file on disk, the checks performed are:

  • File type (file, symlink, directory, socket)
  • Mode (is it executable?)
  • File name (mostly based on extension)
  • If executable, the shebang is read and the interpreter interpreted

If you only have the filename

>>> identify.tags_from_filename('file.py')
{'text', 'python'}

If you only have the interpreter

>>> identify.tags_from_interpreter('python3.5')
{'python', 'python3'}
>>> identify.tags_from_interpreter('bash')
{'shell', 'bash'}
>>> identify.tags_from_interpreter('some-unrecognized-thing')
set()

As a cli

$ identify-cli --help
usage: identify-cli [-h] [--filename-only] path

positional arguments:
  path

optional arguments:
  -h, --help       show this help message and exit
  --filename-only
$ identify-cli setup.py; echo $?
["file", "non-executable", "python", "text"]
0
$ identify-cli setup.py --filename-only; echo $?
["python", "text"]
0
$ identify-cli wat.wat; echo $?
wat.wat does not exist.
1
$ identify-cli wat.wat --filename-only; echo $?
1

Identifying LICENSE files

identify also has an api for determining what type of license is contained in a file. This routine is roughly based on the approaches used by licensee (the ruby gem that github uses to figure out the license for a repo).

The approach that identify uses is as follows:

  1. Strip the copyright line
  2. Normalize all whitespace
  3. Return any exact matches
  4. Return the closest by edit distance (where edit distance < 5%)

To use the api, install via pip install identify[license]

>>> from identify import identify
>>> identify.license_id('LICENSE')
'MIT'

The return value of the license_id function is an SPDX id. Currently licenses are sourced from choosealicense.com.

How it works

A call to tags_from_path does this:

  1. What is the type: file, symlink, directory? If it's not file, stop here.
  2. Is it executable? Add the appropriate tag.
  3. Do we recognize the file extension? If so, add the appropriate tags, stop here. These tags would include binary/text.
  4. Peek at the first X bytes of the file. Use these to determine whether it is binary or text, add the appropriate tag.
  5. If identified as text above, try to read and interpret the shebang, and add appropriate tags.

By design, this means we don't need to partially read files where we recognize the file extension.

Project details


Release history Release notifications | RSS feed

Download files

Download the file for your platform. If you're not sure which to choose, learn more about installing packages.

Source Distribution

identify-2.4.10.tar.gz (98.8 kB view details)

Uploaded Source

Built Distribution

identify-2.4.10-py2.py3-none-any.whl (98.5 kB view details)

Uploaded Python 2 Python 3

File details

Details for the file identify-2.4.10.tar.gz.

File metadata

  • Download URL: identify-2.4.10.tar.gz
  • Upload date:
  • Size: 98.8 kB
  • Tags: Source
  • Uploaded using Trusted Publishing? No
  • Uploaded via: twine/3.7.1 importlib_metadata/4.10.0 pkginfo/1.8.2 requests/2.27.1 requests-toolbelt/0.9.1 tqdm/4.62.3 CPython/3.8.10

File hashes

Hashes for identify-2.4.10.tar.gz
Algorithm Hash digest
SHA256 e12b2aea3cf108de73ae055c2260783bde6601de09718f6768cf8e9f6f6322a6
MD5 e9ff7091331698f96a48271c52517fa0
BLAKE2b-256 59abab4e935a24ef1982503beabb48d9fd6cbfb3954d17436f59606b39670ae5

See more details on using hashes here.

Provenance

File details

Details for the file identify-2.4.10-py2.py3-none-any.whl.

File metadata

  • Download URL: identify-2.4.10-py2.py3-none-any.whl
  • Upload date:
  • Size: 98.5 kB
  • Tags: Python 2, Python 3
  • Uploaded using Trusted Publishing? No
  • Uploaded via: twine/3.7.1 importlib_metadata/4.10.0 pkginfo/1.8.2 requests/2.27.1 requests-toolbelt/0.9.1 tqdm/4.62.3 CPython/3.8.10

File hashes

Hashes for identify-2.4.10-py2.py3-none-any.whl
Algorithm Hash digest
SHA256 7d10baf6ba6f1912a0a49f4c1c2c49fa1718765c3a37d72d13b07779567c5b85
MD5 82812b455ae3e10ddf45f1aa1dff95a8
BLAKE2b-256 61bf4957e7d1a19ce822490c09524eed1d8004a5ef8a89be32ecd0689b28fe84

See more details on using hashes here.

Provenance

Supported by

AWS AWS Cloud computing and Security Sponsor Datadog Datadog Monitoring Fastly Fastly CDN Google Google Download Analytics Microsoft Microsoft PSF Sponsor Pingdom Pingdom Monitoring Sentry Sentry Error logging StatusPage StatusPage Status page