Determine scripting language from string

Question

I've written a generic file system viewer in php and I'd like to add context highlighting. Geshi looks good for this, but appears to require me to send in the language I want to highlight the code in.

Any existing methods on how to determine the scripting language of a given file by contents and/or location?

I have the mime type from:

$finfo = finfo_open(FILEINFO_MIME_TYPE); 
$mime_type = @finfo_file($finfo, $full_path );

That lets me know it's text at least (I allow download of non text too).

I'm thinking that parsing the bang line/file extension or looking for simple tags like php would get me a good chunk of the way for things like perl/shell scripts/php.

I also have the path to the file, as these files are coming directly off the source servers so path based rules may work for things like /etc/httpd/conf.d/*, /etc/passwd.

Perfect accuracy isn't really a problem as I'll allow the user to override the language used for the syntax. I just want to provide a low overhead educated guess to start with without writing this from scratch.

One other caveat. Some of these files can be > 150mb so I'd like to only read part of the file although I could just turn off this feature for large files if needed.

Why do you not look at the file's extension?

str
– str

2011-10-29 17:34:53 +00:00
Commented Oct 29, 2011 at 17:34 — str
– str, Commented Oct 29, 2011 at 17:34

Travis Beale · Accepted Answer · 2011-10-29 17:34:31Z

1

If you can call out to an external program, try the Linux file command.

answered Oct 29, 2011 at 17:34

Travis Beale

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4 Comments

Daren Schwenke Over a year ago

Yes I can. That gives me bang line parsing. Good start.

Daren Schwenke Over a year ago

You know I had dismissed the capibilities of 'file' as nothing more than what mime-type would give me but, I just tested this and it's pretty good. Actually .. fails to detect perl scripts as perl on a windows mounted fs.

Travis Beale Over a year ago

Do the misidentifed perl scripts start with a bang line?

Daren Schwenke Over a year ago

Yes, but they are like #!perl

Daren Schwenke · Accepted Answer · 2011-10-29 19:35:19Z

0

I'm surprised noone pointed me to prettify.js from google code. It will probably do everything I need it to, client side.

answered Oct 29, 2011 at 19:35

Daren Schwenke

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