How to get the content-type of a file in PHP?

Question

I'm using PHP to send an email with an attachment. The attachment could be any of several different file types (pdf, txt, doc, swf, etc).

First, the script gets the file using "file_get_contents".

Later, the script echoes in the header:

Content-Type: <?php echo $the_content_type; ?>; name="<?php echo $the_file_name; ?>"

How to I set the correct value for $the_content_type?

Answer 1

try this:

function ftype($f) {
                    curl_setopt_array(($c = @curl_init((!preg_match("/[a-z]+:\/{2}(?:www\.)?/i",$f) ? sprintf("%s://%s/%s", "http" , $_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'],$f) :  $f))), array(CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER => 1, CURLOPT_HEADER => 1));
                        return(preg_match("/Type:\s*(?<mime_type>[^\n]+)/i", @curl_exec($c), $m) && curl_getinfo($c, CURLINFO_HTTP_CODE) != 404)  ? ($m["mime_type"]) : 0;

         }
echo ftype("http://img2.orkut.com/images/medium/1283204135/604747203/ln.jpg"); // print image/jpeg

Answer 2

I've tried most of the suggestions, but they all fail for me (I'm inbetween any usefull version of PHP apparantly. I ended up with the following function:

function getShellFileMimetype($file) {
    $type = shell_exec('file -i -b '. escapeshellcmd( realpath($_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT'].$file)) );
    if( strpos($type, ";")!==false ){
        $type = current(explode(";", $type));
    }
    return $type;
}

Answer 3

I guess that i found a short way. Get the image size using:

$infFil=getimagesize($the_file_name);

and

Content-Type: <?php echo $infFil["mime"] ?>; name="<?php echo $the_file_name; ?>"

The getimagesize returns an associative array which have a MIME key

I used it and it works

Answer 4

function getMimeType( $filename ) {
        $realpath = realpath( $filename );
        if ( $realpath
                && function_exists( 'finfo_file' )
                && function_exists( 'finfo_open' )
                && defined( 'FILEINFO_MIME_TYPE' )
        ) {
                // Use the Fileinfo PECL extension (PHP 5.3+)
                return finfo_file( finfo_open( FILEINFO_MIME_TYPE ), $realpath );
        }
        if ( function_exists( 'mime_content_type' ) ) {
                // Deprecated in PHP 5.3
                return mime_content_type( $realpath );
        }
        return false;
}

This worked for me

Why is mime_content_type() deprecated in PHP?