How to determine the encoding of text?

Question

I received some text that is encoded, but I don\'t know what charset was used. Is there a way to determine the encoding of a text file using Python? How can I detect the enc

Answer 1

This site has python code for recognizing ascii, encoding with boms, and utf8 no bom: https://unicodebook.readthedocs.io/guess_encoding.html. Read file into byte array (data): http://www.codecodex.com/wiki/Read_a_file_into_a_byte_array. Here's an example. I'm in osx.

#!/usr/bin/python                                                                                                  

import sys

def isUTF8(data):
    try:
        decoded = data.decode('UTF-8')
    except UnicodeDecodeError:
        return False
    else:
        for ch in decoded:
            if 0xD800 <= ord(ch) <= 0xDFFF:
                return False
        return True

def get_bytes_from_file(filename):
    return open(filename, "rb").read()

filename = sys.argv[1]
data = get_bytes_from_file(filename)
result = isUTF8(data)
print(result)


PS /Users/js> ./isutf8.py hi.txt                                                                                     
True