validatemyfile

Validates files against a library of known file types/formats

To run, just execute python validate.py <filename>

To add new file types, create a new <extension>.py file in the filetypes directory. That python module should contain two methods:

• check(filename) This method should return True if the file is a valid file of this format, False otherwise.

• description This method should return a descriptive string about this file type.

Also add a small test file of the new file type in the test directory.

When you've created your new file module, please send me a pull request to incorporate it into the main library.

Notes:

My philosophy is to make a file validator that basically acts as a sanity checker. Many genomics files are massive in size but are basically a long list of similarly-formatted lines. I'd like this validator to read just a few lines and decide if the file makes sense. Therefore, I am not interested in validating the entire file at this point (but maybe later!); I just want to have a quick tool that someone can run to see if a file could possibly be the type of file one thinks it is, based on its name.