•Re: MIME types

For example, if I send a request for http://www.php.net/index.php I can easily tell this is a PHP file because it has a filename included.

You are confused. A "PHP File" is not a MIME type. This URL may return a plain text file, an image, an MPEG, a PDF, or even HTML.

Repeat after me:

"There is no necessary correlation between a URL and the content type it serves."

Now, to answer your next question, the LWP module can give you access to the Content-type header of the response, which is where you find the real "MIME type". It'll look like text/plain or image/jpeg. None of those include the letters "PHP", by the way. {grin}

-- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker

Comment on •Re: MIME types

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Re: •Re: MIME types by shaolin_gungfu (Novice) on Mar 30, 2002 at 22:46 UTC
thanks for the response, yeah I thought I probably got the MIME types thing a bit confused, so I guess the MIME type just tells the type of document right, i.e. the content type. "There is no necessary correlation between a URL and the content type it serves." ok I got that, but unfortunately I still have my problem... you see i'm trying to find out the different technologies that are used on different sites, i.e. the number of sites using Perl/PHP/ASP, I can tell this by the file extension, i.e. index.php or index.pl or index.asp etc, so if I just send a request for http://www.google.com/ how can I get the extension of the file it returns...? I just need to get the filename of the returned file, or something like that, if anyone knows a better way to do this great :-) I hope that made my question a little clearer, thanks again! btw, is it true that Perl is the only programming language that looks the same before and after RSA encryption?! :-)	[reply]
Re3: MIME types by Bobcat (Scribe) on Mar 31, 2002 at 02:34 UTC
Keep in mind that the extension isn't a guarantee that the site is running NT, ASP, straight HTML, JSP or your favorite other technology; it's very easy to tell Apache, for example, that all files ending with ".asp" should be parsed as PHP files. Not only that, but using a module like HTML::Mason preparses HTML files. I believe this is the recommended functionality.	[reply]
Re: Re: ?Re: MIME types by Ryszard (Priest) on Mar 31, 2002 at 03:29 UTC
Just to be a little different once, i went and renamed all my .pl CGI's to .html. I dont think there is any clear and definitive method of determining what technology a site actually uses. The answer to your second question, nope, machine code... :-)	[reply]
•Re: Re: •Re: MIME types by merlyn (Sage) on Mar 31, 2002 at 17:23 UTC
I can tell this by the file extension No, you can't. Please stop hallucinating. The information you want is not available. -- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker	[reply]