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  2. JAVA400-L
  3. February 2006

Re: Determining if a file is text or binary?

Joe Sam Shirah wrote:
>         As you might expect from the response so far, it is nearly
> impossible, in the general case, to determine text/binary format with 100%
> reliability.  Most attempts check for magic numbers ( like 0xCAFEBABE for
> Java classes ) and values greater than 127 to detect non-ASCII values.

Actually, I found an open source solution that I can hand a byte array
and it will tell me what kind of file it is.

It's jMimeMagic on sourceforge (don't have the url hand right now).

I just read the first two K of the file into a byte array, use
jMimeMagic to check the file ... if it can figure out the file, I try
again after using CharConvert to change the CCSID on the byte array.

Seems to work ok so far.

david

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