How Can I Best Guess the Encoding when the BOM (Byte Order Mark) is Missing?

Question

My program has to read files that use various encodings. They may be ANSI, UTF-8 or UTF-16 (big or little endian).

When the BOM (Byte Order Mark) is there, I have n

Answer 1

Here is how notepad does that

There is also the python Universal Encoding Detector which you can check.