How to get mime from a file through Python?

Question

How can I get Mimetype from a file through Python?

I’m not just talking about getting through the extension, but also reading the file metadata.

How can I do that?

Note: I tried to use the python-magic on Windows, but it didn’t work.

Answer 1

Solution with the Python-Magic:

import magic
m = magic.Magic(mime=True)
mime_type = m.from_file("arquivo.pdf")
print mime_type

Edit:

According to the official library website Python-magic there are 2 factors that can cause the above code not to work.

The first factor consists of a library name conflict as there are two libraries called magic for Python! The correct library would be Python-magic-0.4.13.

The second factor (which may cause non-working on Windows) is the dependencies that need to be installed.

In Windows, the utility file must exist on the machine and its path must be passed as argument in the constructor:

import magic
m = magic.Magic(magic_file="C:\windows\system32\file.exe")
mime_type = m.from_file("arquivo.pdf")
print mime_type

The utility file compiled for Windows can be obtained here.

More details can be obtained here.

Answer 2

shlex:

import subprocess
import shlex

file_name = 'pdf.fake'
cmd = shlex.split('file --mime-type {0}'.format(file_name))
result = subprocess.check_output(cmd)
mime_type = result.split()[-1]
print (mime_type)

Output:

b'application/pdf'

Answer 3

You can use the library mimetypes:

>>> import urllib, mimetypes
>>> 
>>> url = urllib.pathname2url('meu_arquivo.xml')
>>> print mimetypes.guess_type(url)
('application/xml', None)

Reference: https://docs.python.org/2/library/mimetypes.html