Detects

• ASCII, UTF-8, UTF-16 (2 variants), UTF-32 (4 variants)
• Big5, GB2312, EUC-TW, HZ-GB-2312, ISO-2022-CN (Traditional and Simplified Chinese)
• EUC-JP, SHIFT_JIS, CP932, ISO-2022-JP (Japanese)
• EUC-KR, ISO-2022-KR (Korean)
• KOI8-R, MacCyrillic, IBM855, IBM866, ISO-8859-5, windows-1251 (Cyrillic)
• ISO-8859-5, windows-1251 (Bulgarian)
• ISO-8859-1, windows-1252 (Western European languages)
• ISO-8859-7, windows-1253 (Greek)
• ISO-8859-8, windows-1255 (Visual and Logical Hebrew)
• TIS-620 (Thai)

Requires Python 2.7 or 3.5+.

Install from PyPI:

pip install chardet

For users, docs are now available at https://chardet.readthedocs.io/.

chardet comes with a command-line script which reports on the encodings of one or more files:

% chardetect somefile someotherfile
somefile: windows-1252 with confidence 0.5
someotherfile: ascii with confidence 1.0

This is a continuation of Mark Pilgrim's excellent chardet. Previously, two versions needed to be maintained: one that supported python 2.x and one that supported python 3.x. We've recently merged with Ian Cordasco's charade fork, so now we have one coherent version that works for Python 2.7+ and 3.4+.