Let chardetect take data on stdin.

This comes in handy for sending it segments of very large compressed files.

bin/chardetect.py

@@ -1,6 +1,5 @@
 #!/usr/bin/env python
-"""
-Script which takes one or more file paths and reports on their detected
+"""Script which takes one or more file paths and reports on their detected
 encodings
 
 Example::
@@ -9,30 +8,35 @@
     somefile: windows-1252 with confidence 0.5
     someotherfile: ascii with confidence 1.0
 
+If no paths are provided, it takes its input from stdin.
+
 """
-from sys import argv
+from sys import argv, stdin
 
 from chardet.universaldetector import UniversalDetector
 
 
-def description_of(path):
+def description_of(file, name='stdin'):
     """Return a string describing the probable encoding of a file."""
     u = UniversalDetector()
-    for line in open(path, 'rb'):
+    for line in file:
         u.feed(line)
     u.close()
     result = u.result
     if result['encoding']:
-        return '%s: %s with confidence %s' % (path,
+        return '%s: %s with confidence %s' % (name,
                                               result['encoding'],
                                               result['confidence'])
     else:
-        return '%s: no result' % path
+        return '%s: no result' % name
 
 
 def main():
-    for path in argv[1:]:
-        print description_of(path)
+    if len(argv) <= 1:
+        print description_of(stdin)
+    else:
+        for path in argv[1:]:
+            print description_of(open(path, 'rb'), path)
 
 
 if __name__ == '__main__':