How to reliably detect file types?

Question

Objective: given the file, determine whether it is of a given type (XML, JSON, Properties etc)

Consider the case of XML - Up until we ran into this issue, the follow

Answer 1

File type detection tools:

• Mime Type Detection Utility
• DROID (Digital Record Object Identification)
• ftc - File Type Classifier
• JHOVE, JHOVE2
• NLNZ Metadata Extraction Tool
• Apache Tika
• TrID, TrIDNet
• Oracle Outside In (commercial)
• Forensic Innovations File Investigator TOOLS (commercial)