Getting A File's Mime Type In Java

Question

I was just wondering how most people fetch a mime type from a file in Java? So far I\'ve tried two utils: JMimeMagic & Mime-Util.

Th

Answer 1

From roseindia:

FileNameMap fileNameMap = URLConnection.getFileNameMap();
String mimeType = fileNameMap.getContentTypeFor("alert.gif");

Answer 2

If you are stuck with java 5-6 then this utility class from servoy open source product.

You only need this function

public static String getContentType(byte[] data, String name)

It probes the first bytes of the content and returns the content types based on that content and not by file extension.

Answer 3

With Apache Tika you need only three lines of code:

File file = new File("/path/to/file");
Tika tika = new Tika();
System.out.println(tika.detect(file));

If you have a groovy console, just paste and run this code to play with it:

@Grab('org.apache.tika:tika-core:1.14')
import org.apache.tika.Tika;

def tika = new Tika()
def file = new File("/path/to/file")
println tika.detect(file)

Keep in mind that its APIs are rich, it can parse "anything". As of tika-core 1.14, you have:

String  detect(byte[] prefix)
String  detect(byte[] prefix, String name)
String  detect(File file)
String  detect(InputStream stream)
String  detect(InputStream stream, Metadata metadata)
String  detect(InputStream stream, String name)
String  detect(Path path)
String  detect(String name)
String  detect(URL url)

See the apidocs for more information.

Answer 4

Apache Tika offers in tika-core a mime type detection based based on magic markers in the stream prefix. tika-core does not fetch other dependencies, which makes it as lightweight as the currently unmaintained Mime Type Detection Utility.

Simple code example (Java 7), using the variables theInputStream and theFileName

try (InputStream is = theInputStream;
        BufferedInputStream bis = new BufferedInputStream(is);) {
    AutoDetectParser parser = new AutoDetectParser();
    Detector detector = parser.getDetector();
    Metadata md = new Metadata();
    md.add(Metadata.RESOURCE_NAME_KEY, theFileName);
    MediaType mediaType = detector.detect(bis, md);
    return mediaType.toString();
}

Please note that MediaType.detect(...) cannot be used directly (TIKA-1120). More hints are provided at https://tika.apache.org/1.24/detection.html.

Answer 5

I couldn't find anything to check for video/mp4 MIME type so I made my own solution. I happened to observe that Wikipedia was wrong and that the 00 00 00 18 66 74 79 70 69 73 6F 6D file signature is not correct. the fourth byte (18) and all 70 (excluded) after changes quite a lot amongst otherwise valid mp4 files.

This code is essentially a copy/paste of URLConnection.guessContentTypeFromStream code but tailored to video/mp4.

BufferedInputStream bis = new BufferedInputStream(new ByteArrayInputStream(content));
String mimeType = URLConnection.guessContentTypeFromStream(bis);

// Goes full barbaric and processes the bytes manually
if (mimeType == null){
    // These ints converted in hex ar:
    // 00 00 00 18 66 74 79 70 69 73 6F 6D
    // which are the file signature (magic bytes) for .mp4 files
    // from https://www.wikiwand.com/en/List_of_file_signatures
    // just ctrl+f "mp4"
    int[] mp4_sig = {0, 0, 0, 24, 102, 116, 121, 112};

    bis.reset();
    bis.mark(16);
    int[] firstBytes = new int[8];
    for (int i = 0; i < 8; i++) {
        firstBytes[i] = bis.read();
    }
    // This byte doesn't matter for the file signature and changes
    mp4_sig[3] = content[3];

    bis.reset();
    if (Arrays.equals(firstBytes, mp4_sig)){
        mimeType = "video/mp4";
    }
}

Tested successfully against 10 different .mp4 files.

EDIT: Here is a useful link (if it is still online) where you can find samples of many types. I don't own those videos, don't know who does either, but they're useful for testing the above code.

Answer 6

In Java 7 you can now just use Files.probeContentType(path).