All files are binary, but probably by binary you mean non-text.
There are lots of ways to decide if a file is non-text, but I don't know of any "standard" way. You can detect a file as not-ascii by simply searching for any character greater than 0x7f. But that doesn't handle a UTF-8 file, which is an 8bit text file representing Unicode.
The way I've seen done many times is to search for regular occurrence of the end-of-line character, and the lack of nulls. Most "binary" files will have more nulls than linefeeds, and any null could be considered a marker for a non-text file.
If you're happy with your particular perl script, probably it could be readily translated to Python.
ritu wrote:
Hi, I'm wondering if Python has a utility to detect binary content in files? Or if anyone has any ideas on how that can be accomplished? I haven't been able to find any useful information to accomplish this (my other option is to fire off a perl script from within m python script that will tell me whether the file is binary), so any pointers will be appreciated. Thanks, Ritu
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