filemagic is a ctypes wrapper for libmagic, the library that supports the file command on most Unix systems. The package provides a simple Python API for identifying files using the extensive database of magic strings that ships with libmagic.
- Documentation for filemagic is hosted on Read the Docs.
- Packages are hosted by the Python Package Index.
filemagic has been tested against libmagic 5.11. It supports both Python2 and Python3, as well as CPython and PyPy.
Below is a short snippet of code showing how to use filemagic to identifying this README file.
>>> import magic
>>> with magic.Magic() as m:
... m.id_filename('setup.py')
...
'ASCII text'
It is recommended that magic.Magic be used with a context manager (the with statement) to avoid leaking resources from libmagic when instances go out of scope. Otherwise the close() method must be called explicitly.
Refer to the filemagic documenation for further references.