bindet (binary file type detection)

Fast file type detection. Read more here: documentation

Supported file types

• Zip
• Rar (Rar 4 and 5)
• Tar
• Png
• Jpg
• 7-zip
• Opus
• Vorbis
• Mp3
• Webp
• Flac
• Matroska (mkv, mka, mks, mk3d, webm)
• Wasm
• Java Class
• Mach-O
• Elf (Executable and Linkable Format)
• Wav
• Avi
• Aiff
• Tiff
• Sqlite3 (.db)
• Ico
• Dalvik
• Pdf
• Gif
• Xcf
• Scala Tasty
• Bmp
• others are on the road

Example:

use std::fs::{OpenOptions};
use std::io::BufReader;
use std::io::ErrorKind;
use bindet;
use bindet::types::FileType;
use bindet::FileTypeMatch;
use bindet::FileTypeMatches;

fn example() {
    let file = OpenOptions::new().read(true).open("files/test.tar").unwrap();
    let buf = BufReader::new(file);

    let detect = bindet::detect(buf).map_err(|e| e.kind());
    let expected: Result<Option<FileTypeMatches>, ErrorKind> = Ok(Some(FileTypeMatches::new(
        vec![FileType::Tar],
        vec![FileTypeMatch::new(FileType::Tar, true)]
    )));

    assert_eq!(detect, expected);
}

False Positives

Some file types magic numbers are composed of Human Readable Characters. For example, FLAC uses fLaC (0x66 0x4C 0x61 0x43) and PDF uses %PDF- (0x25 0x50 0x44 0x46 0x2D), because of this, text files that starts with this sequence can be detected as a binary file.

bindet reports those file types with FileTypeMatch::full_match = false, a second step can take these types and validate the prediction by applying a better specification match, however, at the moment, this only happens for Zip files.

You can use crates like encoding_rs to determine whether a file is really binary or text.