How to determine file type

File type or file format is the way to classify and differentiate one kind of file from another. For example, Microsoft Excel and Adobe PDF are two different file types. The common way to determine the file type is by its extension, so when you have a file e.g. sample.docx you expect that this file will be opened by some text processing application like Microsoft Word. But there are the cases when you don’t know the file type e.g. when the file came from the Internet but you don’t know its name or filename doesn’t have an extension.

Determine file-type

GroupDocs.Viewer enables you to determine the file type by file extension, media-type, or raw bytes.

Determine file-type by the file extension

To determine file type from the file extension use fromExtension() method of FileType class.

String extension = ".docx";
FileType fileType = FileType.fromExtension(extension);

System.out.println("\nExtension " + extension + "; File type: " + fileType);

The output would be similar to:

> Extension .docx; File type: Microsoft Word Open XML Document (.docx)

Determine file-type by media-type

In case you receive a file from the Internet and you have only its media-type use fromMediaType() method of FileType class.

String mediaType = "application/pdf";
FileType fileType = FileType.fromMediaType(mediaType);

System.out.println("\nMedia-type " + mediaType + "; File type: " + fileType);

The output would be similar to:

Extension .pdf; File type: Portable document Format File (.pdf)

Determine file type by stream

When you don’t know the name of a file or media-type you can try determining file type by passing stream to fromStream() method of FileType. GroupDocs.Viewer will try reading the file signature and map it to the file type.

 try (InputStream inputStream = new FileInputStream("sample.docx")) {
     FileType fileType = FileType.fromStream(inputStream);

     System.out.println("\nFile path " + TestFiles.SAMPLE_DOCX + "; File type: " + fileType);
 }

A similar output would be printed in case of GroupDocs.Viewer detected the file type successfully.

Extension .docx; File type: Microsoft Word Open XML Document (.docx)