Eric I dream of a tool which will tell me what obscure (or not so obscure) data structuring format something is stored in just by copy-pasting in the file contents. This would be very useful when a custom file-ext is being used (eg. saveGames). This tool probably already exists in multiple forms, right now I'm trying to figure something which looks like JSON & XML at once.

Mark Dain Sounds like file(1) to me? "file <filename>" will determine (with disturbing accuracy) what kind of file it is. Here's the man page: linux.die.net/man/...

Martijn Isn't that mostly based on magic numbers though? If @eric is talking about data files stored in basic ASCII there is no way to discern JSON from CSV without parsing the data in some way. I don't believe `file` does that?

Nkrs AFAIK the 'file' program uses magic numbers to detect file types instead of extensions or MIME types: en.wikipedia.org/w...

Mark Dain Seems you're right it can't tell the difference between JSON and CSV... That's disappointing considering it can often tell the text is in English. @eric would it be possible to upload the file? Perhaps we could try telling what format it's in