How to determine file type

Introduction

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.

Determining file type

GroupDocs.Viewer enables you to determine the file type by file extension (in future releases will be added possibility to determine file type by media-type and raw bytes). The code snippets provided in this article can also be found in our public examples at GitHub.

Determining file-type from 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 + ".");

As you can see from the output below the file type detected correctly.

    D:\viewer>mvn clean compile exec:java
    [INFO] Scanning for projects...
    [INFO] 
    [INFO] ---< GroupDocs.Viewer.Examples.Java:GroupDocs.Viewer.Examples.Java >----
    [INFO] Building GroupDocs.Viewer.Examples.Java
    [INFO] 
    [INFO] --- exec-maven-plugin:1.6.0:java (default-cli) @ GroupDocs.Viewer.Examples.Java ---
     
     
    Extension .docx; File type: Microsoft Word Open XML Document (.docx).
     
     
    [INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------
    [INFO] BUILD SUCCESS
    [INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------
    [INFO] Total time:  1.115 s
    [INFO] Finished at: 2020-07-07T11:07:11+03:00
    [INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------

The media-type will be mapped to the file type as shown on the screenshot below.

Determining file type form stream or bytes

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 stream = new FileInputStream("sample.docx")) {
    FileType fileType = FileType.fromStream(stream);

    System.out.println("\nFile type: " + fileType);
}

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

More resources

GitHub Examples 

You may easily run the code above and see the feature in action in our GitHub examples:

• GroupDocs.Viewer for Java examples, plugins, and showcase
• Document Viewer for .NET App WebForms UI Modern Example
• Document Viewer for Java App Dropwizard UI Modern Example
• Document Viewer for Java Spring UI Example
• GroupDocs.Viewer for .NET samples, plugins and showcase
• Document Viewer for .NET MVC UI Example 

Free Online App 

Along with full-featured Java library we provide simple but powerful free Apps. You are welcome to view your documents with free to use online GroupDocs Viewer App.