[Python-ideas] os.path.isbinary

[Chris Angelico]

On Mon, Aug 12, 2013 at 3:32 PM, Mathias Panzenböck
<grosser.meister.morti at gmx.net> wrote:
> On 08/12/2013 03:52 PM, Masklinn wrote:
>>
>> On 2013-08-12, at 15:42 , Philipp A. wrote:
>>>
>>> well, the only remotely valid thing to do is to test if the input data is
>>> decodable with any of the encodings python knows.
>>
>>
>> Most iso-8859 parts can decode any byte (and thus any byte sequence).
>>
>
> Are you sure about the null byte? '\0'
> But yes, just looking if there is a '\0' in the file isn't a good heuristic
> either.

I've often used the presence of a NUL in the data as a simple
heuristic for "binary file", though only in places where it won't
matter (for instance, showing file size in bytes rather than line
count - if a binary file happens to have no \0 and its number of \n
gets counted, big deal). Otherwise, not worth the hassle of finding
out.

ChrisA