Detect and Prevent Binary File from Opening

I still haven't figured this one out... anyone have any ideas?

What you might try is getting the first 10 or 100 or 500 bytes of the file and examining each byte to see if its in the range of alphanumeric characters or special text chars like CR, LF, TAB, etc. If X percent of the chars are not in the range of what would normally be included in a text file, then it probably isn't a text file.

The only thing that would make this difficult is the encoding, whether its Unicode or UTF-8, etc., for unicode you'd have to examine two bytes at a time, etc. So, in the end, it may be a bit more challenging than you had hoped for, but I certainly think it's doable.

Marianne,

Thanks for the suggestion. It sounds like there's no easy way to do this, so your approach sounds good. I'll have to give this a try. I appreciate the feedback!