On Sun, Nov 15, 2009 at 4:06 AM, Nobody <nob...@nowhere.com> wrote: > On Sat, 14 Nov 2009 17:02:29 +0100, Luca Fabbri wrote: > >> I'm looking for a way to be able to load a generic file from the >> system and understand if he is plain text. >> The mimetype module has some nice methods, but for example it's not >> working for file without extension. >> >> Any suggestion? > > You could use the "file" command. It's normally installed by default on > Unix systems, but you can get a Windows version from:
FWIW, IIRC the heuristic `file` uses to check whether a file is text or not is whether it contains any null bytes; if it does, it classifies it as binary (i.e. not text). Cheers, Chris -- http://blog.rebertia.com -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list