I have done a lot of research on this and haven't found anything useful. I want am making a simple program in objective c for personal use that opens files and gives information about them. The only problem i have encountered is that i cannot find the file of a file i am opening. Without simply looking at the extension, is there a way to find the full file format of a file in objective c?
If possible, i would also like to be able to save that file in a different format. Information on this subject is also important for this application. Help will be greatly appreciated.
Mac OS X has type information attached to each file which specifies what the type of the file is supposed to be. This information is given by the application which last saved the file, so it is not necessarily correct. Also, new versions of OS X ignore this information and go entirely off of the file extension. However, the information is still stored and can be retrieved using NSFileManager's attributesOfItemAtPath:error: method.
As mentioned by quixoto above, OS X now maps extensions to UTIs. The UTI of a file can be retrieved using NSWorkspace, which can also tell you what the UTI means. This code will get the localized description of the file at /full/path/to/file:
NSWorkspace *ws = [NSWorkspace sharedWorkspace];
NSString *description = [ws localizedDescriptionForType:[ws typeOfFile:@"/full/path/to/file" error:nil]];
The typeOfFile:error: method requires an absolute path.