cid b7325287f7e172c02adc1ddb73bf5169cf76c545af095ffff6c2c07ce50b6b39 · original · open access · via wikipedia
Title: Content sniffing Authors: Venue: Wikipedia Year: unknown Canonical: wiki:content-sniffing URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_sniffing Collector: wikipedia OA: true ABSTRACT Content sniffing, also known as media type sniffing or MIME sniffing, is the practice of inspecting the content of a byte stream to attempt to deduce the file format of the data within it. Content sniffing is generally used to compensate for a lack of accurate metadata that would otherwise be required to enable the file to be interpreted correctly. Content sniffing techniques tend to use a mixture of techniques that rely on the redundancy found in most file formats: looking for file signatures and magic numbers, and heuristics including searching for well-known representative substrings, the use of byte frequency and n-gram tables, and Bayesian inference.