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I am writing a program in Ruby which will search for strings in text files within a directory - similar to Grep.
I don't want it to attempt to search in binary files but I can't find a way in Ruby to determine whether a file is binary or text.
The program needs to work on both Windows and Linux.
If anyone could point me in the right direction that would be great.
Thanks,
Xanthalas
410
File extensions We can usually tell if a file is binary or text based on its file extension. This is because by convention the extension reflects the file format, and it is ultimately the file format that dictates whether the file data is binary or text.
The two file types may look the same on the surface, but they encode data differently. While both binary and text files contain data stored as a series of bits (binary values of 1s and 0s), the bits in text files represent characters, while the bits in binary files represent custom data.
Text files are organized around lines, each of which ends with a newline character ('\n'). The source code files are themselves text files. A binary file is the one in which data is stored in the file in the same way as it is stored in the main memory for processing.
The top four rows are times in seconds to write 100 numbers. The ratios are in the last two rows. So the answer is that it is between 14 and 62 times faster to write binary versus text.
libmagic is a library which detects filetypes. For this solution I assume, that all mimetype's which start with text/ represent text files. Eveything else is a binary file. This assumption is not correct for all mime types (eg. application/x-latex, application/json), but libmagic detect's these as text/plain.
require "filemagic"
def binary?(filename)
begin
fm= FileMagic.new(FileMagic::MAGIC_MIME)
!(fm.file(filename)=~ /^text\//)
ensure
fm.close
end
end
gem install ptools
require 'ptools'
File.binary?(file)
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