Good practices regarding MIME type

[Omar Polo]

Solène Rapenne <solene at perso.pw> writes:

> Hi,
>
> I wrote a gemini server in C and I currently use an hardcoded list of
> file extensions <-> MIME type assocation.
> This isn't great because it relies on file extension which can be
> wrong, but a file without extension would
> use a default.
>
> I chose to set a default text/gemini in case the extension is unknown
> or if the file has no extension.
>
> What are the good practices to determine a file MIME type?
>
> regards
> Solène

I'm using the same approach in my server, but there are two alternatives
I know:

 - using /usr/share/misc/mime.types (still a list, but probably more
   complete than a manual one).  Don't know if it's widespread, but
   it's present in base on OpenBSD :)
 - using libmagic: it's a library to detect the MIME type by reading the
   file.  it powers the file(1) command on some unices.  The drawback is
   that it needs to open and read the file, whereas guessing from the
   extension doesn't.