The present study is concerning qualitative and quantitative detection of different coal samples based on near infrared spectroscopy. Firstly, near infrared spectroscopy combined with discriminant analysis (DA) was used for the coal cinder characteristics in different spectral pre-processing methods, at the same time it will establish the quantitative of the total moisture. The result indicated that 97.78% recognition ratio for calibration and 93.33% recognition ratio for validation were achieved by DA for the cinder characteristics. The PLS quantitative model of the total moisture of the establishment of the original spectral was the best, the correlation coefficients of calibration and prediction respectively were 0.981 and 0.641, RMSEC, RMSEP and RMSECV respectively were 0.859, 2.51 and 3.44.