Organised collection of common file extensions

This project maintains reusable collections of common file extensions categorised per typology. It can be used by any program to quickly distinguish between file types. It acts faster than mime/type or libmagic recognition, but is of course less precise.

Organisation

Each category is a file named after a generic typology stored in data/:

• archiv :: archives and disc images
• audio :: playable audio
• book :: electronic books
• code :: code in machine languages
• exec :: executable binaries
• font :: typography fonts
• image :: static images
• sheet :: spreadsheets
• slide :: presentations and slides
• text :: text in human languages
• video :: moving images
• web :: web developers bread and butter

Inside each category file there is a file extension string on each new line. This collection is not complete... and knowing how standards go: it will never be. We welcome your contribution.

Some extensions (for instance html, see #10 and #11) may belong to more than one category: code or web. In these cases any extra occurrance of the extension will be followed by space and a % on the same line to mark it as duplicate of another categorisation that took priority.

To establish the category of a single file one can simply ignore all duplicate extensions containing % on the same line. Duplicates may be useful to establish the category of a directory containing multiple files by means of fuzzy logic.

Quick start

Launch this script ./render/list

It will print on your terminal all currently known extensions by category:

sheet: ods xls xlsx csv ics vcf
image: 3dm 3ds max bmp dds gif jpg jpeg png psd xcf tga thm tif tiff yuv ai eps ps svg dwg dxf gpx kml kmz webp
video: 3g2 3gp aaf asf avchd avi drc flv m2v m4p m4v mkv mng mov mp2 mp4 mpe mpeg mpg mpv mxf nsv ogg ogv ogm qt rm rmvb roq srt svi vob webm wmv yuv
audio: aac aiff ape au flac gsm it m3u m4a mid mod mp3 mpa pls ra s3m sid wav wma xm
archiv: 7z a apk ar bz2 cab cpio deb dmg egg gz iso jar lha mar pea rar rpm s7z shar tar tbz2 tgz tlz war whl xpi zip zipx xz pak
exec: exe msi bin command sh bat crx
code: c cc class clj cpp cs cxx el go h java lua m m4 php pl po py rb rs sh swift vb vcxproj xcodeproj xml diff patch html js
web: html htm css js jsx less scss wasm php
font: eot otf ttf woff woff2
slide: ppt odp
text: doc docx ebook log md msg odt org pages pdf rtf rst tex txt wpd wps
book: mobi epub azw1 azw3 azw4 azw6 azw cbr cbz

Code

You are meant to write your own code to parse file-extension-list.

To facilitate the task rendered lists are provided

• by extension, JSON format
• by category, JSON format

This repository also contain some example code in render.

The shell script ./render/list will print a list of categories and extensions associated on each line.

The lua scripts ./render/json-categories and ./render/json-extensions will produce key/value maps per-category and per-extension as those distributed in pub.

The shell script build-zsh-parser renders a file file-extension-parser.zsh containing a zsh function file-extension-parser(); This function can then be called with a filename as argument and it will return its category according to the archived extensions in data/; It relies on a switch case construction and two string modifier operations that are completely native to zsh.

To contribute please file a pull request on https://github.com/dyne/file-extension-list/pulls

Usage

File-extension-list is used by the software application harvest for fast categorization of large amounts of directories containing multiple file types.

You are welcome to let us know if you are using it too.

License

File-extension-list is maintained by Jaromil and Puria

This is free and unencumbered software released into the public domain.

Anyone is free to copy, modify, publish, use, compile, sell, or distribute this software, either in source code form or as a compiled binary, for any purpose, commercial or non-commercial, and by any means.

In jurisdictions that recognize copyright laws, the author or authors of this software dedicate any and all copyright interest in the software to the public domain. We make this dedication for the benefit of the public at large and to the detriment of our heirs and successors. We intend this dedication to be an overt act of relinquishment in perpetuity of all present and future rights to this software under copyright law.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.

For more information, please refer to https://unlicense.org