mimelib 🙊

A MIME type is a label used to identify a type of data. It is used so software can know how to handle the data. It serves the same purpose on the Internet that file extensions do on Microsoft Windows. — Quentin

mimelib aims at working with MIME types easier in Python. The standard library comes with the mimetypes module. This library builds on top of it and adds more niceties to it, so you're generally happier when working with MIME types today.

>>> import mimelib
>>> mimelib.mimetype('application/json').is_text
True
>>> mimelib.url('https://example.com/avatar.jpg').is_image
True
>>> mimelib.url('pianoman.mp3').file_type
media

Installation

To install mimelib, use pipenv (or pip):

$ pipenv install mimelib

Usage

mimelib is intended to be used alongside the mimetypes standard library module, and builds on top of it under the hood. So, if you are adding additional MIME types to be recognized, mimelib will work just as fine.

Initialization

Either a valid MIME type string, or a URL or path can be used to work with mimelib.

>>> m1 = mimelib.mimetype("application/json")  # pass a valid MIME type
>>> m2 = mimelib.url("foo/bar/dataset.csv")  # or pass a path / url

Both these methods return a MIME object, the various useful properties of which are listed below.

Getting the file type

The following file types are reported: text, image, media and binary.

>>> mimelib.mimetype("application/ecmascript").file_type
text
>>> mimelib.mimetype("video/mpeg").file_type
media
>>> mimelib.url("archive.rar").file_type
binary

The Mime object also has the following properties for conveniently checking specific file types:

• is_text
• is_image
• is_media
• is_binary