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

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))