Subj : Determing file types
To   : comp.programming
From : Matthias Kaeppler
Date : Mon Jul 11 2005 11:14 am

Hello,

I am currently developing a filemanager and I was wondering if anyone 
has an idea how I could determine the type of a file in the GUI (e.g. 
"PDF File", "Plain Text", ...).

I have played around with gnome-vfsmm a little, and it has a function 
for getting the MIME type of a file; but just displaying that 
information is not very attractive.
Of course I could build a class which parses the MIME-string and builds 
a more human readable filetype description, e.g. turn "audio/mpeg" into 
"MP3 File".
However, there are literally hundreds of different file types and this 
would be a lot of tedious work.

Does anyone have a better idea how to do this? Is there maybe already 
some sort of library which features a more descriptive analysis of 
filetypes?

Thanks in advance.

-- 
Matthias Kaeppler

.