Get mime type of external file using cURL and php

PHP curl_getinfo()

<?php
  # the request
  $ch = curl_init('http://www.google.com');
  curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
  curl_exec($ch);

  # get the content type
  echo curl_getinfo($ch, CURLINFO_CONTENT_TYPE);

  # output
  text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1
?>

curl

curl -I http://www.google.com

output

HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
Location: http://www.google.com/
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
Date: Fri, 09 Apr 2010 20:35:12 GMT
Expires: Sun, 09 May 2010 20:35:12 GMT
Cache-Control: public, max-age=2592000
Server: gws
Content-Length: 219

Yes, you can get it like this.

$file_info = new finfo(FILEINFO_MIME_TYPE);
$mime_type = $file_info->buffer(file_get_contents($image_url));
echo $mime_type;

Using the finfo_file function from the FileInfo extension (enabled by default in PHP 5.3). http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.finfo-file.php

From the example in the documentation

$finfo = finfo_open(FILEINFO_MIME_TYPE);
echo finfo_file($finfo, $filename);
finfo_close($finfo);

In PHP versions prior to 5.3 the pecl extension can be installed http://pecl.php.net/package/Fileinfo

However in this case it requires the magic_open (libmagic) library http://sourceforge.net/projects/libmagic

The alternative is to use the deprecated function mime_content_type($filename) http://au.php.net/manual/en/function.mime-content-type.php

Which relies on the mime.magic file