The Detector Interface

The org.apache.tika.detect.Detector interface is the basis for most of the content type detection in Apache Tika. All the different ways of detecting content all implement the same common method:

MediaType detect(java.io.InputStream input,
                 Metadata metadata) throws java.io.IOException

The detect method takes the stream to inspect, and a Metadata object that holds any additional information on the content. The detector will return a MediaType object describing its best guess as to the type of the file.

In general, only two keys on the Metadata object are used by Detectors. These are Metadata.RESOURCE_NAME_KEY which should hold the name of the file (where known), and Metadata.CONTENT_TYPE which should hold the advertised content type of the file (eg from a webserver or a content repository).

Mime Magic Detction

By looking for special ("magic") patterns of bytes near the start of the file, it is often possible to detect the type of the file. For some file types, this is a simple process. For others, typically container based formats, the magic detection may not be enough. (More detail on detecting container formats below)

Tika is able to make use of a a mime magic info file, in the Freedesktop MIME-info format to peform mime magic detection.

This is provided within Tika by org.apache.tika.detect.MagicDetector. It is most commonly access via org.apache.tika.mime.MimeTypes, normally sourced from the tika-mimetypes.xml file.

Resource Name Based Detection

Where the name of the file is known, it is sometimes possible to guess the file type from the name or extension. Within the tika-mimetypes.xml file is a list of patterns which are used to identify the type from the filename.

However, because files may be renamed, this method of detection is quick but not always as accurate.

This is provided within Tika by org.apache.tika.detect.NameDetector.

Known Content Type "Detection

Sometimes, the mime type for a file is already known, such as when downloading from a webserver, or when retrieving from a content store. This information can be used by detectors, such as org.apache.tika.mime.MimeTypes,

The default Mime Types Detector

By default, the mime type detection in Tika is provided by org.apache.tika.mime.MimeTypes. This detector makes use of tika-mimetypes.xml to power magic based and filename based detection.

Firstly, magic based detection is used on the start of the file. If the file is an XML file, then the start of the XML is processed to look for root elements. Next, if available, the filename (from Metadata.RESOURCE_NAME_KEY) is then used to improve the detail of the detection, such as when magic detects a text file, and the filename hints it's really a CSV. Finally, if available, the supplied content type (from Metadata.CONTENT_TYPE) is used to further refine the type.

Container Aware Detection

Several common file formats are actually held within a common container format. One example is the PowerPoint .ppt and Word .doc formats, which are both held within an OLE2 container. Another is Apple iWork formats, which are actually a series of XML files within a Zip file.

Using magic detection, it is easy to spot that a given file is an OLE2 document, or a Zip file. Using magic detection alone, it is very difficult (and often impossible) to tell what kind of file lives inside the container.

For some use cases, speed is important, so having a quick way to know the container type is sufficient. For other cases however, you don't mind spending a bit of time (and memory!) processing the container to get a more accurate answer on its contents. For these cases, a container aware detector should be used.

Tika provides a wrapping detector in the parsers bundle, of org.apache.tika.detect.ContainerAwareDetector. This detector will check for certain known containers, and if found, will open them and detect the appropriate type based on the contents. If the file isn't a known container, it will fall back to another detector for the answer (most commonly the default MimeTypes detector)

Because this detector needs to read the whole file to process the container, it must be used with a org.apache.tika.io.TikaInputStream. If called with a regular InputStream, then all work will be done by the fallback detector.

For more information on container formats and Tika, see

Language Detection

Tika is able to help identify the language of a piece of text, which is useful when extracting text from document formats which do not include language information in their metadata.

The language detection is provided by org.apache.tika.language.LanguageIdentifier