How to detect string byte encoding?

Question

I've got about 1000 filenames read by os.listdir(), some of them are encoded in UTF8 and some are CP1252.

I want to decode all of them to Unicode for further processing in my script. Is there a way to get the source encoding to correctly decode into Unicode?

Example:

for item in os.listdir(rootPath):

    #Convert to Unicode
    if isinstance(item, str):
        item = item.decode('cp1252')  # or item = item.decode('utf-8')
    print item

Answer 1

if your files either in cp1252 and utf-8, then there is an easy way.

import logging
def force_decode(string, codecs=['utf8', 'cp1252']):
    for i in codecs:
        try:
            return string.decode(i)
        except UnicodeDecodeError:
            pass

    logging.warn("cannot decode url %s" % ([string]))

for item in os.listdir(rootPath):
    #Convert to Unicode
    if isinstance(item, str):
        item = force_decode(item)
    print item

otherwise, there is a charset detect lib.

Python - detect charset and convert to utf-8

https://pypi.python.org/pypi/chardet

Answer 2

Use chardet library. It is super easy

import chardet

the_encoding = chardet.detect('your string')['encoding']

and that's it!