How can I detect the encoding/codepage of a text file

Question

In our application, we receive text files (.txt, .csv, etc.) from diverse sources. When reading, these files sometimes contain garbage, because the

Answer 1

Thanks @Erik Aronesty for mentioning uchardet.

Meanwhile the (same?) tool exists for linux: chardet.
Or, on cygwin you may want to use: chardetect.

See: chardet man page: https://www.commandlinux.com/man-page/man1/chardetect.1.html

This will heuristically detect (guess) the character encoding for each given file and will report the name and confidence level for each file's detected character encoding.