NAME

File::MimeInfo - Determine file type

SYNOPSIS

use File::MimeInfo;
my $mime_type = mimetype($file);

DESCRIPTION

This module can be used to determine the mime type of a file. It tries to implement the freedesktop specification for a shared MIME database.

For this module shared-mime-info-spec 0.12 was used.

This package only uses the globs file. No real magic checking is used. The File::MimeInfo::Magic package is provided for magic typing.

If you want to detemine the mimetype of data in a memory buffer you should use File::MimeInfo::Magic in combination with IO::Scalar.

EXPORT

The method mimetype is exported by default. The methods inodetype, globs and describe can be exported on demand.

METHODS

new()

Simple constructor to allow Object Oriented use of this module. If you want to use this, use the package as use File::MimeInfo (); to avoid importing sub mimetype.

mimetype($file)

Returns a mime-type string for $file, returns undef on failure.

This method bundles inodetype and globs.

If these methods are unsuccessful the file is read and the mime-type defaults to 'text/plain' or to 'application/octet-stream' when the first ten chars of the file match ascii control chars (white spaces excluded). If the file doesn't exist or isn't readable undef is returned.

inodetype($file)

Returns a mimetype in the 'inode' namespace or undef when the file is actually a normal file.

globs($file)

Returns a mime-type string for $file based on the glob rules, returns undef on failure. The file doesn't need to exist.

When called in list context and the mimetype is determined by the extension it also returns the extension. This allows you to split a file in name + extension correctly even when the name contains dots.

extensions($mimetype)

In list context, returns the list of extensions of a given mime-type; In scalar context, returns the mime-type that was first found in the database.

describe($mimetype, $lang)

Returns a description of this mimetype as supplied by the mime info database. You can specify a language with the optional parameter $lang, this should be the two letter language code used in the xml files. Also you can set the global variable $File::MimeInfo::LANG to specify a language.

This method returns undef when no xml file was found (i.e. the mimetype doesn't exist in the database). It returns an empty string when the xml file doesn't contain a description in the language you specified.

Currently no real xml parsing is done, it trusts the xml files are nicely formatted.

rehash()

Rehash the data files. Glob information is preparsed when this method is called.

If you want to by-pass the XDG basedir system you can specify your database directories by setting @File::MimeInfo::DIRS. But normally it is better to change the XDG basedir environment variables.

DIAGNOSTICS

This module throws an exception when it can't find any data files, when it can't open a data file it found for reading or when a subroutine doesn't get enough arguments. In the first case you either don't have the freedesktop mime info database installed, or your environment variables point to the wrong places, in the second case you have the database installed, but it is broken (the mime info database should logically be world readable).

TODO

Make an option for using some caching mechanism to reduce init time.

Make "describe" do real xml parsing ?

BUGS

Perl versions prior to 5.8.0 do not have the ':utf8' IO Layer, thus for the default method and for reading the xml files utf8 is not supported for these versions.

Since it is not possible to distinguish between encoding types (utf8, latin1, latin2 etc.) in a straightforward manner only utf8 is supported (because the spec recommends this).

Please mail the author when you encounter any other bugs.

AUTHOR

Jaap Karssenberg || Pardus [Larus] <pardus@cpan.org>

Copyright (c) 2003 Jaap G Karssenberg. All rights reserved. This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself.

SEE ALSO

File::BaseDir, File::MimeInfo::Magic, File::MimeInfo::Rox

related CPAN modules

File::MMagic

freedesktop specifications used

http://freedesktop.org/Standards/shared-mime-info-spec, http://freedesktop.org/Standards/basedir-spec

freedesktop mime database

http://freedesktop.org/Software/shared-mime-info

other programs using this mime system

http://rox.sourceforge.net