chardet's Introduction

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-8859-5, windows-1251 (Bulgarian)
ISO-8859-1, windows-1252 (Western European languages)
ISO-8859-7, windows-1253 (Greek)
ISO-8859-8, windows-1255 (Visual and Logical Hebrew)
TIS-620 (Thai)

Note

Our ISO-8859-2 and windows-1250 (Hungarian) probers have been temporarily disabled until we can retrain the models.

Requires Python 2.6 or later

Installation

Install from PyPI:

pip install chardet

Documentation

For users, docs are now available at http://chardet.readthedocs.org.

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 Cordasco's charade fork, so now we have one coherent version that works for Python 2.6+.