akindofmagic

akindofmagic (fork of python-magic) is a python interface to the libmagic file type identification library. libmagic identifies file types by checking their headers according to a predefined list of file types. This functionality is exposed to the command line by the Unix command file.

Usage

>>> import magic
>>> magic.from_file("testdata/test.pdf")
'PDF document, version 1.2'
>>> magic.from_buffer(open("testdata/test.pdf").read(1024))
'PDF document, version 1.2'
>>> magic.from_file("testdata/test.pdf", mime=True)
'application/pdf'

There is also a Magic class that provides more direct control, including overriding the magic database file and turning on character encoding detection. This is not recommended for general use. In particular, it's not safe for sharing across multiple threads and will fail throw if this is attempted.

Dependencies

On Windows:

• None. That's the point of this fork - the Windows DLLs are provided. They are built with instructions modified from nscaife/file-windows

On OSX:

• When using Homebrew: brew install libmagic
• When using macports: port install file

Troubleshooting

• 'MagicException: could not find any magic files!': some installations of libmagic do not correctly point to their magic database file. Try specifying the path to the file explicitly in the constructor: magic.Magic(magic_file="path_to_magic_file").

Author

Originally written by Adam Hupp in 2001 for a project that never got off the ground. It originally used SWIG for the C library bindings, but switched to ctypes once that was part of the python standard library.

This fork was largely refactored by Alexander Walters from code found at ahupp/python-magic.

License

python-magic is distributed under the MIT license. See the included LICENSE file for details.