Modern Python Standard Library Cookbook

How to do it...

For this recipe, the following steps are to be performed:

1. While the mimetypes module is not bullet proof, as it relies on the name of the file to detect the expected type, it's frequently enough to handle most common cases.
2. Users will usually assign proper names to their files for their own benefit (especially Windows users, where the extension is vital for the proper working of the file), guessing the type with mimetypes.guess_type is often enough:

import mimetypes

def guess_file_type(filename):
    if not getattr(guess_file_type, 'initialised', False):
        mimetypes.init()
        guess_file_type.initialised = True
    file_type, encoding = mimetypes.guess_type(filename)
    return file_type

3. We can call guess_file_type against any file to get ...