How to get MIME type of a file in PHP 5.5?

Question

I am using mime_content_type() in PHP 5.5 to get a MIME type, but it throws fatal: error function not found.

How can I achieve this on PHP

Answer 1

You should understand that file_get_contents will upload whole file to the memory, it is not good way to get only mime type. You don't need to use buffer method and file_get_contents function in this case.

To prevent any errors and warnings, better do like this.

$filename = 'path to your file';

if (class_exists('finfo')) {
    $finfo = new finfo(FILEINFO_MIME_TYPE);
    if (is_object($finfo)) {
        echo $finfo->file($filename);
    }
} else {
    echo 'fileinfo did not installed';
}

Also you should know $finfo->file will throw PHP Warning if it fail.

If fileinfo is not installed properly, and you have a fresh version of PHP, you can get mime type from headers.

You can use cURL to get mime type from headers.

    $ch = curl_init();
    curl_setopt_array($ch, array(
            CURLOPT_HEADER => true,
            CURLOPT_NOBODY => true,
            CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER => true,
            CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER => false,
            CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYHOST => false,
            CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION => true,
            CURLOPT_MAXREDIRS => 1,
            CURLOPT_URL => $link)
    );

    $headers = curl_exec($ch);
    curl_close($ch);

    if (preg_match('/Content-Type:\s(.*)/i', $headers, $matches)) {
        echo trim($matches[1], "\t\n\r");
    }else {
        echo 'There is no content type in the headers!';
    }

Also you can use get_headers function, but it more slow than cURL request.

$url = 'http://www.example.com';

$headers = get_headers($url, 1);

echo $headers['Content-Type'];