How can I determine the mime type of a file by it's extention, i.e.
.html, .avi, .jpg, etc., (or by the file's contents) in Visual Basic
6.0?  Thank you.

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Clarification of Question by johngl-ga on 15 Jul 2004 17:23 PDT

Will doing something like looking up the following work on all Window
systems 95 and above?

Registry entry:

HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT/.gif/Content Type

Can I look up the various extensions this way on all windows versions
(95 and above) and get what I need?  This works great on Windows 2000
but will it work on 95, 98, ME, XP, etc.?  Thank you.

The mime type is just a mapping that is managed by the operating
system, and users can defeat it if they like. There is a very broad
listing of "standard" mime types here:
http://www.iana.org/assignments/media-types/ . Depending on what
you're using this information for, it may be more appropriate to
manage a table of types in your application than trust the system it
is installed on.

I need to be able to do it by file extension or the data itself.  I'm
having trouble finding a good source for both pieces of data.  Thank
you.

You could borrow the type <-> extension mapping from the Apache
configuration file (mime.types). Here's an example:
http://unhinfo.unh.edu/NIS/Courses/Plug-ins/mime-types.html (note that
this file contains many types that don't have related extensions, so
you could ignore those for this purpose)