PDF files are not always detected

[peterekepeter]

From my testing the %PDF- does not necessarily have to be at offset 0. It can be located anywhere in the file. For example I can type some junk into the file in the beginning and it still opens file.

I received multiple files like this from people, so there is something or someone out in the wild that adds extra characters in front of the magic sequence.

A detector would look something like that it searches for a substring inside a search window:

def is_pdf(file_path):
    with open(file_path, "rb") as file:
        # may throw IOError
        header = file.read(1024)
        return b"%PDF-" in header

From what I see currently the library is not built to handle this kind of situation. So I'm leaving this ticket here with this code snippet in case more advanced detection is implemented.

[cdgriffith]

Just to make sure, I did check out the PDF specifications themselves:

The PDF file begins with the 5 characters “%PDF–” and byte offsets shall be calculated from the PERCENT SIGN (25h). NOTE 1 This provision allows for arbitrary bytes preceding the %PDF- without impacting the viability of the PDF file and its byte offsets.

So it is valid for PDFs to not strictly start with the %PDF- but must contain it in their header. Will work on a better way to detect this.

[cdgriffith]

Should work a lot better in version 2, starting the beta now! https://github.com/cdgriffith/puremagic/releases/tag/2.0.0b1