CodecCat v0.1.0a4 — Native Alpha

Native Alpha: improved UTF-8 text recovery.

New in v0.1.0a4:

• Conservative full-string UTF-8 evidence can correct some legacy-charset misclassifications when bytes provide strong Unicode evidence.
• BOM always takes precedence. Strict decoding and optional L3 behavior remain unchanged.
• No model retraining, extra runtime dependencies, or public API signature changes.

Official published-artifact validation:

• 6 platforms, including Linux, macOS, and Windows x86-64 / ARM64, all PASS: https://github.com/Johnny-Kao/CodecCat/actions/runs/42150439965
• Five source-stratified corpora, 843 samples, published v0.1.0a4: 819/843 correctly decoded Unicode text (97.15%). chardet 829/843 (98.34%); charset-normalizer 698/843 (82.80%): https://github.com/Johnny-Kao/CodecCat/actions/runs/42151051728
• Published v0.1.0a3 vs v0.1.0a4 on 285 GLib translation windows: 227 correct -> 271 correct, 44 helps and zero observed harms. Both release wheels contain identical default model SHA256 16073306b5027bf93acc2883f57fbda0cb0cf2d77b9a7bb62cf1b07fcbb9748b, so this is a paired decoder-only improvement: https://github.com/Johnny-Kao/CodecCat/actions/runs/42151536276

Install the Wheel matching your operating system and CPU; Python 3.10+. The release includes SHA256SUMS and MODEL_PROVENANCE.json. Linux wheels are platform-tagged rather than repaired manylinux wheels.

These benchmarks contain training/development overlap or cover one external domain, so they are not independent representative real-world accuracy claims. CPU and latency are single-run observations. Complete caveats and reproduction:
https://github.com/Johnny-Kao/CodecCat/blob/main/research/NATIVE_UTF8_FIX_2026-11-06.md

GitHub Alpha release only; no PyPI upload.