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First of all: you can't have a "Unicode" file. You can have a file containing Unicode code-points encoded in one of the transformation formats defined by the Unicode standard, such as UTF-8 or UTF-16. So the question becomes: I have a byte-stream. Is it a valid (ISO-8859-1|UTF-8|UTF-16)-encoded representation of some text? This can be answered, since none of those encodings defines a meaning for each and every byte-sequence. But this is quite possibly not the answer you're looking for. The way I see it, it's easier to check if your byte-stream contains something you know not to be text, using something like file(2) or File::MMagic as already suggested. Doing it the other way ("is it a valid encoded form") gives you a lot of "this is text" when, in fact, it is nothing intelligible. You could try to decode it and then do some heuristics to see if looks like text (ex. a lot of letters from the same script/writing system in a row, or something of the sort), but I think it's more trouble than it's worth. -- dakkar - Mobilis in mobile Most of my code is tested... In reply to Re: How can I tell if a string contains binary data or plain-old text?
by dakkar
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