How to safely get the file extension from a URL?

Question

Consider the following URLs

http://m3u.com/tunein.m3u
http://asxsomeurl.com/listen.asx:8024
http://www.plssomeotherurl.com/station.pls?id=111
http://22.198.133.16:802         


        

Answer 1

The real proper way is to not use file extensions at all. Do a GET (or HEAD) request to the URL in question, and use the returned "Content-type" HTTP header to get the content type. File extensions are unreliable.

See MIME types (IANA media types) for more information and a list of useful MIME types.