Guessing the encoding of text represented as byte[] in Java

Question

Given an array of bytes representing text in some unknown encoding (usually UTF-8 or ISO-8859-1, but not necessarily so), what is the best way to obtain a guess for the most

Answer 1

The following method solves the problem using juniversalchardet, which is a Java port of Mozilla's encoding detection library.

public static String guessEncoding(byte[] bytes) {
    String DEFAULT_ENCODING = "UTF-8";
    org.mozilla.universalchardet.UniversalDetector detector =
        new org.mozilla.universalchardet.UniversalDetector(null);
    detector.handleData(bytes, 0, bytes.length);
    detector.dataEnd();
    String encoding = detector.getDetectedCharset();
    detector.reset();
    if (encoding == null) {
        encoding = DEFAULT_ENCODING;
    }
    return encoding;
}

The code above has been tested and works as intented. Simply add juniversalchardet-1.0.3.jar to the classpath.

I've tested both juniversalchardet and jchardet. My general impression is that juniversalchardet provides the better detection accuracy and the nicer API of the two libraries.