Python – mechanism to identify compressed file type and uncompress

This page has a list of “magic” file signatures. Grab the ones you need and put them in a dict like below. Then we need a function that matches the dict keys with the start of the file. I’ve written a suggestion, though it can be optimized by preprocessing the magic_dict into e.g. one giant compiled regexp.

magic_dict = {
    "\x1f\x8b\x08": "gz",
    "\x42\x5a\x68": "bz2",
    "\x50\x4b\x03\x04": "zip"
    }

max_len = max(len(x) for x in magic_dict)

def file_type(filename):
    with open(filename) as f:
        file_start = f.read(max_len)
    for magic, filetype in magic_dict.items():
        if file_start.startswith(magic):
            return filetype
    return "no match"

This solution should be cross-plattform and is of course not dependent on file name extension, but it may give false positives for files with random content that just happen to start with some specific magic bytes.