Nodejs - retrieving remote file and detect mime-type

Question

So, this is my problem. I read from some APIs a URL that points to a file. The only thing I know about this file is that it is a file... but I would like to detect what kind of file this is. The URL is not helping since it is encoded in base64 (I guess) and so I have no file name or extension I could use for my scope.

I have tried to use node-mime module (https://github.com/broofa/node-mime) but what I get is application/octet-stream which is not that much useful in detecting the real type of the file.

The aim is to display "in browser" the files that the browser is able to handle without requiring the user to download them.

Thanks!

"URL that points to a file", so obviously you can get a filename from URL, right? Decode it ( Node.js supports base64 decoding ) and use node-mime afterwards. If you can't decode it, then this is impossible to be done. — freakish
– freakish, Commented Sep 25, 2012 at 16:36
Just to add to that - "obviously" isn't that obvious when you deal with optimized servers that don't return extensions for media files... — Martin Wawrusch
– Martin Wawrusch, Commented Feb 22, 2018 at 13:35

Sriharsha · Accepted Answer · 2012-09-25 18:12:17Z

3

If you want to display the files in browser itself without the need to download use 'Content-Disposition: inline' header.

answered Sep 25, 2012 at 18:12

Sriharsha

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0m4r Over a year ago

this is helping. but now I have find out that those files are .zip files, so I should unzip them and then display them... trying to make it working!

Steve Harris · Accepted Answer · 2015-07-29 21:57:10Z

mmmagic will work, but requires an external library (libmagic) or Python equivalent. This presents problems if you do not want to install Python on your Windows machine. It would be nice to have a pure node version of libmagic.

jmulligan · Accepted Answer · 2012-09-25 17:19:08Z

2

Use mmmagic to determine the mime type.

https://npmjs.org/package/mmmagic

answered Sep 25, 2012 at 17:19

jmulligan

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Usman · Accepted Answer · 2024-05-13 15:07:56Z

request({ url: fb_media.media_url, encoding: null }, async function (err, res, body) { const mimeType = res.headers['content-type']; const fileSize = res.headers['content-length']; })

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