Get a list of all the encodings Python can encode to

Question

I am writing a script that will try encoding bytes into many different encodings in Python 2.6. Is there some way to get a list of available encodings that I can iterate ove

Answer 1

You could use a technique to list all modules in the encodings package.

import pkgutil
import encodings

false_positives = set(["aliases"])

found = set(name for imp, name, ispkg in pkgutil.iter_modules(encodings.__path__) if not ispkg)
found.difference_update(false_positives)
print found

Answer 2

Here's a programmatic way to list all the encodings defined in the stdlib encodings package, note that this won't list user defined encodings. This combines some of the tricks in the other answers but actually produces a working list using the codec's canonical name.

import encodings
import pkgutil
import pprint


all_encodings = set()

for _, modname, _ in pkgutil.iter_modules(
        encodings.__path__, encodings.__name__ + '.',
):
    try:
        mod = __import__(modname, fromlist=[str('__trash')])
    except (ImportError, LookupError):
        # A few encodings are platform specific: mcbs, cp65001
        # print('skip {}'.format(modname))
        pass

    try:
        all_encodings.add(mod.getregentry().name)
    except AttributeError as e:
        # the `aliases` module doensn't actually provide a codec
        # print('skip {}'.format(modname))
        if 'regentry' not in str(e):
            raise

pprint.pprint(sorted(all_encodings))

Answer 3

The Python source code has a script at Tools/unicode/listcodecs.py which lists all codecs.

Among the listed codecs, however, there are some that are not Unicode-to-byte converters, like base64_codec, quopri_codec and bz2_codec, as @John Machin pointed out.