Check a webpage remotely to see if if its ASCII or Binary

Question

Hello,

Is it possible to check remotely (no local/FTP access) a URL to see if the webpage (file) was uploaded/created as binary or ascii?

Thanks,

Roy.

Answer 1

Not sure of the value (or indeed, intent) of the question but it's quite possible to send an HTTP GET request to the web page and examine what comes back. If all the bytes are within the range 0x20 through 0x7e, you can safely assume it's ASCII. Anything outside that range is not ASCII.

Perhaps if your question indicated more on why you were trying to do this, we could help you out further.

If you want to figure out whether the page was FTP'ed to the server in ASCII or binary mode, it won't make any difference (and you won't be able to tell) if the server and the machine that uploaded it are both ASCII.

If you uploaded, for example, an EBCDIC file in binary mode to an ASCII server, that will be immediately obvious :-).