Re: Efficiently checking the initial contents of a file

[Nordlöw]

On 16 Maj, 13:12, David Hansen <david.han...@gmx.net> wrote:
> On Fri, 16 May 2008 03:16:13 -0700 (PDT) Nordlöw wrote:
>
> > How can I efficiently using pure emacs-lisp (without calling any
> > external process) investigate the first bytes of a file?
>
> > My guess is
> > - Open parts of the file into a buffer or string.
> > - Alt 1. Switch to the buffer and do things.
>
> (with-temp-buffer
>   ;; Read the first 42 characters (not bytes) into the temp buffer.
>   (insert-file-contents filename nil 0 42)
>   ;; Do whatever you want to do here.
>   )
>
> David

Great!

Thanks for all the help!

I wanted a quick way of discarding ELFs from my tags-query-replace()
operations.

This is the result of my coding.
Is it ok to use string-width() and looking-at() if don't care about
different string encodings, that is I just want to compare binary byte-
arrays?

;; For additional speed you can use
;; `insert-file-contents-literally', if you don't need code
;; conversions, decompression, etc.
(defun file-begin-p (filename beg)
  "Determine if FILENAME begins with BEG."
  (interactive "fFile to investigate: ")
  (if (and (file-exists-p filename)
           (file-readable-p filename))
      (with-temp-buffer
        (let ((width (string-width beg)))
          (insert-file-contents-literally filename nil 0 width)
          (looking-at beg)
          ))))
;; TEST: (file-begin-p "/bin/ls" "ELF")

(defun file-begin-ELF-p (filename)
  "Return non-nil if FILENAME is an ELF (Executable and Linkable
Format)"
  (interactive "fFile to investigate: ")
  (file-begin-p filename "ELF")
  )
;; TEST: (file-begin-ELF-p "/bin/ls")


Thanks again,
Nordlöw