How to find the mime type of a file in python?

Question

Let\'s say you want to save a bunch of files somewhere, for instance in BLOBs. Let\'s say you want to dish these files out via a web page and have the client automatically o

Answer 1

I'm surprised that nobody has mentioned it but Pygments is able to make an educated guess about the mime-type of, particularly, text documents.

Pygments is actually a Python syntax highlighting library but is has a method that will make an educated guess about which of 500 supported document types your document is. i.e. c++ vs C# vs Python vs etc

import inspect

def _test(text: str):
    from pygments.lexers import guess_lexer
    lexer = guess_lexer(text)
    mimetype = lexer.mimetypes[0] if lexer.mimetypes else None
    print(mimetype)

if __name__ == "__main__":
    # Set the text to the actual defintion of _test(...) above
    text = inspect.getsource(_test)
    print('Text:')
    print(text)
    print()
    print('Result:')
    _test(text)

Output:

Text:
def _test(text: str):
    from pygments.lexers import guess_lexer
    lexer = guess_lexer(text)
    mimetype = lexer.mimetypes[0] if lexer.mimetypes else None
    print(mimetype)


Result:
text/x-python

Now, it's not perfect, but if you need to be able to tell which of 500 document formats are being used, this is pretty darn useful.