Truly Universal Encoding Detection in Python

Charamel is a pure Python universal character encoding library that supports all of Python character encodings. The library is based on machine learning and trained to handle more than 60 languages. All that with no external dependencies. Ain't it sweet? 🍭

Installation

$ pip install charamel

Features

• 🌈 Powered by machine learning
• 📦 No dependencies
• ⚡ Faster than other pure Python libraries
• 🐍 Supports all 98 Python encodings
• 🌍 Works on 60+ languages
• 🔎 97% accuracy

Usage

API is centered around Detector class, with detect method being responsible for basic encoding detection:

>>> from charamel import Detector
>>> detector = Detector()
>>> content = b'El espa\xf1ol o castellano del lat\xedn hablado'
>>> detector.detect(content)
<Encoding.ISO_8859_14: 'iso8859_14'>

This returns the most likely encoding that can decode the byte string. Let's try it out:

>>> from charamel import Encoding
>>> content.decode(Encoding.ISO_8859_14)
'El español o castellano del latín hablado'

To get multiple likely encodings along with confidences in range [0, 1], use probe method:

>>> detector.probe(content, top=3)
[(<Encoding.ISO_8859_14: 'iso8859_14'>, 0.9964286725192874),
 (<Encoding.CP_1258: 'cp1258'>, 0.9919203166700203),
 (<Encoding.ISO_8859_3: 'iso8859_3'>, 0.9915028923264849)]

Detector can be configured to use a subset of encodings. Less possible encodings lead to faster detection:

>>> detector = Detector(encodings=[Encoding.UTF_8, Encoding.BIG_5])

Another useful Detector parameter is min_confidence. Basically, this parameter regulates how conservative the Detector will be. Confidence for encodings that are returned by detect and probe methods must be greater that min_confidence:

>>> detector = Detector(min_confidence=0.5)

If no encoding confidences exceed min_confidence, detect will return None and probe will return an empty list.

Benchmark

Below is the comparison between Charamel and other available Python encoding detection libraries:

How to run this benchmark (requires Python 3.6+):

$ git clone git@github.com:chomechome/charamel.git
$ cd charamel
$ pip install poetry>=1.0.5
$ make benchmark

It also produces a detailed breakdown for all represented encodings:

* - not officially support for detector