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

Some encoding strategies, please uncomment to taste :

#!/bin/bash
#
tmpfile=$1
echo '-- info about file file ........'
file -i $tmpfile
enca -g $tmpfile
echo 'recoding ........'
#iconv -f iso-8859-2 -t utf-8 back_test.xml > $tmpfile
#enca -x utf-8 $tmpfile
#enca -g $tmpfile
recode CP1250..UTF-8 $tmpfile

You might like to check the encoding by opening and reading the file in a form of a loop... but you might need to check the filesize first :

encodings = ['utf-8', 'windows-1250', 'windows-1252' ...etc]
            for e in encodings:
                try:
                    fh = codecs.open('file.txt', 'r', encoding=e)
                    fh.readlines()
                    fh.seek(0)
                except UnicodeDecodeError:
                    print('got unicode error with %s , trying different encoding' % e)
                else:
                    print('opening the file with encoding:  %s ' % e)
                    break