Determining binary/text file type in Java?

There's no guaranteed way, but here are a couple of possibilities:

1. Look for a header on the file. Unfortunately, headers are file-specific, so while you might be able to find out that it's a RAR file, you won't get the more generic answer of whether it's text or binary.

2. Count the number of character vs. non-character types. Text files will be mostly alphabetical characters while binary files - especially compressed ones like rar, zip, and such - will tend to have bytes more evenly represented.

3. Look for a regularly repeating pattern of newlines.

Using Java 7 Files class http://docs.oracle.com/javase/7/docs/api/java/nio/file/Files.html#probeContentType(java.nio.file.Path)

boolean isBinaryFile(File f) throws IOException {
        String type = Files.probeContentType(f.toPath());
        if (type == null) {
            //type couldn't be determined, assume binary
            return true;
        } else if (type.startsWith("text")) {
            return false;
        } else {
            //type isn't text
            return true;
        }
    }

Run file -bi {filename}. If whatever it returns starts with 'text/', then it's non-binary, otherwise it is. ;-)

I made this one. A bit simpler, but for latin-based languages, it should work fine, with the ratio adjustment.

/**
 *  Guess whether given file is binary. Just checks for anything under 0x09.
 */
public static boolean isBinaryFile(File f) throws FileNotFoundException, IOException {
    FileInputStream in = new FileInputStream(f);
    int size = in.available();
    if(size > 1024) size = 1024;
    byte[] data = new byte[size];
    in.read(data);
    in.close();

    int ascii = 0;
    int other = 0;

    for(int i = 0; i < data.length; i++) {
        byte b = data[i];
        if( b < 0x09 ) return true;

        if( b == 0x09 || b == 0x0A || b == 0x0C || b == 0x0D ) ascii++;
        else if( b >= 0x20  &&  b <= 0x7E ) ascii++;
        else other++;
    }

    if( other == 0 ) return false;

    return 100 * other / (ascii + other) > 95;
}

Have a look at the JMimeMagic library.

jMimeMagic is a Java library for determining the MIME type of files or streams.