chardet

Character encoding auto-detection in Python. As smart as your browser. Open source.

Documentation

• Usage
  • Basic usage
  • Example: Using the detect function
  • Controlling how much data to process
  • Filtering by encoding era
  • Getting all candidates with detect_all
  • Advanced usage: incremental detection
  • Example: Detecting encodings of multiple files
  • Command-line tool
• Supported encodings
  • MODERN_WEB
  • LEGACY_ISO
  • LEGACY_MAC
  • LEGACY_REGIONAL
  • DOS
  • MAINFRAME
• Frequently asked questions
  • What is character encoding?
  • What is character encoding auto-detection?
  • Isn’t that impossible?
  • Who wrote this detection algorithm?
  • Yippie! Screw the standards, I’ll just auto-detect everything!
  • Why bother with auto-detection if it’s slow, inaccurate, and non-standard?
• How it works
  • Overview
  • BOM detection
  • UTF-16/32 without BOM
  • Escaped encodings
  • Multi-byte encodings
  • Single-byte encodings
  • Encoding era filtering and tie-breaking
• API Reference
  • chardet package

Indices and tables

• Index

• Module Index

• Search Page