How to determine the encoding of text?
Solution 1:
EDIT: chardet seems to be unmantained but most of the answer applies. Check https://pypi.org/project/charset-normalizer/ for an alternative
Correctly detecting the encoding all times is impossible.
(From chardet FAQ:)
However, some encodings are optimized for specific languages, and languages are not random. Some character sequences pop up all the time, while other sequences make no sense. A person fluent in English who opens a newspaper and finds “txzqJv 2!dasd0a QqdKjvz” will instantly recognize that that isn't English (even though it is composed entirely of English letters). By studying lots of “typical” text, a computer algorithm can simulate this kind of fluency and make an educated guess about a text's language.
There is the chardet library that uses that study to try to detect encoding. chardet is a port of the auto-detection code in Mozilla.
You can also use UnicodeDammit. It will try the following methods:
- An encoding discovered in the document itself: for instance, in an XML declaration or (for HTML documents) an http-equiv META tag. If Beautiful Soup finds this kind of encoding within the document, it parses the document again from the beginning and gives the new encoding a try. The only exception is if you explicitly specified an encoding, and that encoding actually worked: then it will ignore any encoding it finds in the document.
- An encoding sniffed by looking at the first few bytes of the file. If an encoding is detected at this stage, it will be one of the UTF-* encodings, EBCDIC, or ASCII.
- An encoding sniffed by the chardet library, if you have it installed.
- UTF-8
- Windows-1252
Solution 2:
Another option for working out the encoding is to use libmagic (which is the code behind the file command). There are a profusion of python bindings available.
The python bindings that live in the file source tree are available as the python-magic (or python3-magic) debian package. It can determine the encoding of a file by doing:
import magic
blob = open('unknown-file', 'rb').read()
m = magic.open(magic.MAGIC_MIME_ENCODING)
m.load()
encoding = m.buffer(blob) # "utf-8" "us-ascii" etc
There is an identically named, but incompatible, python-magic pip package on pypi that also uses libmagic
. It can also get the encoding, by doing:
import magic
blob = open('unknown-file', 'rb').read()
m = magic.Magic(mime_encoding=True)
encoding = m.from_buffer(blob)
Solution 3:
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 :
# PYTHON
encodings = ['utf-8', 'windows-1250', 'windows-1252'] # add more
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