Identifying file type in Java

Question

Please help me to find out the type of the file which is being uploaded. I wanted to distinguish between excel type and csv.

MIMEType returns same for both of these file. Please help.

Answer 1

I use Apache Tika which identifies the filetype using magic byte patterns and globbing hints (the file extension) to detect the MIME type. It also supports additional parsing of file contents (which I don't really use).

Here is a quick and dirty example on how Tika can be used to detect the file type without performing any additional parsing on the file:

import java.io.File;
import java.io.FileInputStream;
import java.io.InputStream;
import java.util.HashMap;

import org.apache.tika.metadata.HttpHeaders;
import org.apache.tika.metadata.Metadata;
import org.apache.tika.metadata.TikaMetadataKeys;
import org.apache.tika.mime.MediaType;
import org.apache.tika.parser.AutoDetectParser;
import org.apache.tika.parser.ParseContext;
import org.apache.tika.parser.Parser;
import org.xml.sax.helpers.DefaultHandler;

public class Detector {

    public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception {
        File file = new File("/pats/to/file.xls");

        AutoDetectParser parser = new AutoDetectParser();
        parser.setParsers(new HashMap<MediaType, Parser>());

        Metadata metadata = new Metadata();
        metadata.add(TikaMetadataKeys.RESOURCE_NAME_KEY, file.getName());

        InputStream stream = new FileInputStream(file);
        parser.parse(stream, new DefaultHandler(), metadata, new ParseContext());
        stream.close();

        String mimeType = metadata.get(HttpHeaders.CONTENT_TYPE);
        System.out.println(mimeType);
    }

}

Answer 2

I hope this will help. Taken from an example not from mine:

import javax.activation.MimetypesFileTypeMap;
import java.io.File;

class GetMimeType {
  public static void main(String args[]) {
    File f = new File("test.gif");
    System.out.println("Mime Type of " + f.getName() + " is " +
                         new MimetypesFileTypeMap().getContentType(f));
    // expected output :
    // "Mime Type of test.gif is image/gif"
  }

}

Same may be true for excel and csv types. Not tested.