how to get the information about file on remote server primarily its extension??

rkarna99

bradgrafelman

First, what do you mean by "file on remote server" ? How is this file accessed?

If you're talking about a URL which prompts your browser to open or save a file, you could use [man]get_headers/man and parse out the 'Content-Disposition' header to see if it contains a filename (and, if not, probably default to assuming that the last component of the URL path component is to be used).

sneakyimp

If you mean just the filename suffix, you don't even need to talk to the remote server to parse that information out from the url. You could just examine the url and use some pattern matching to extract it.

If you want to know for sure what type of file is on the remote server, you will have to contact it and download the file and examine it -- the file extension could be forged or inaccurate.

bradgrafelman

sneakyimp;11029905 wrote:
If you mean just the filename suffix, you don't even need to talk to the remote server to parse that information out from the url. You could just examine the url and use some pattern matching to extract it.

Not really; URLs have no direct correlation to files or file systems.

In other words, just because I give you a URL to http://example.com/download.foo?id=123 doesn't mean you can assume that the "foo" file extension has any relevance, nor could you even assume that I have a file called "download.foo" anywhere on the server's file system.

sneakyimp

bradgrafelman;11029907 wrote:
Not really; URLs have no direct correlation to files or file systems.

In other words, just because I give you a URL to http://example.com/download.foo?id=123 doesn't mean you can assume that the "foo" file extension has any relevance, nor could you even assume that I have a file called "download.foo" anywhere on the server's file system.

You are correct that any given url might come back with some arbitrary content download with a recommended attachment name. I mistakenly assumed that, because the OP asked about "how to get the information about file on remote server" that there would be the url to a specific file.

bradgrafelman

sneakyimp;11029909 wrote:
I mistakenly assumed that, because the OP asked about "how to get the information about file on remote server" that there would be the url to a specific file.

A URL is a URL (... is a URL ...); you can't make any more assumptions about the URL http://example.com/download.foo?id=123 than you can about the URL http://example.com/files/myfile.exe .

This is why I think we need a bit more information about what type of content/response is returned by the URL(s) in question.