I'd like to tell binary from text data (like the Unix file program). Right now I'm using 
sub is_text
{
    my $c = shift;
    my $cl = length($c);
    return 0 if ($cl == 0);

    my $t = $c;
    $t =~ tr/a-zA-Z0-9//cs;
    return ($cl - length($t)) < 100;
}

[download]
which obviously has a lot of room for improvements. Is there a CPAN module for this kind of thing?

In reply to Distinguishing text from binary data by Anonymous Monk

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