Chardet: The Universal Character Encoding Detector

Detects

• ASCII, UTF-8, UTF-16 (2 variants), UTF-32 (4 variants)
• Big5, GB2312, EUC-TW, HZ-GB-2312, ISO-2022-CN (Traditional and Simplified Chinese)
• EUC-JP, SHIFT_JIS, CP932, ISO-2022-JP (Japanese)
• EUC-KR, ISO-2022-KR (Korean)
• KOI8-R, MacCyrillic, IBM855, IBM866, ISO-8859-5, windows-1251 (Cyrillic)
• ISO-8859-2, windows-1250 (Hungarian)
• ISO-8859-5, windows-1251 (Bulgarian)
• windows-1252 (English)
• ISO-8859-7, windows-1253 (Greek)
• ISO-8859-8, windows-1255 (Visual and Logical Hebrew)
• TIS-620 (Thai)

Requires Python 2.6 or later

Command-line Tool

chardet comes with a command-line script which reports on the encodings of one or more files:

% chardetect somefile someotherfile
somefile: windows-1252 with confidence 0.5
someotherfile: ascii with confidence 1.0

About

This is a continuation of Mark Pilgrim's excellent chardet. Previously, two versions needed to be maintained: one that supported python 2.x and one that supported python 3.x. We've recently merged with Ian Corduscano's charade fork, so now we have one coherent version that works for Python 2.6+.

maintainer

Dan Blanchard