Usage [Universal Encoding Detector]
Keywords: character, set, encoding, detection, Python, XML, feed

# Universal Encoding Detector

Character encoding auto-detection in Python. As smart as your browser. Open source.

- Download ·
- Documentation ·
- FAQ

## Usage

### Basic usage

The easiest way to use the Universal Encoding Detector library is with the `detect` function.

### Example: Using the `detect` function

The `detect` function takes one argument, a non-Unicode string. It returns a dictionary containing the auto-detected character encoding and a confidence level from `0` to `1`.

    >>> import urllib
    >>> rawdata = urllib.urlopen('http://yahoo.co.jp/').read()
    >>> import chardet
    >>> chardet.detect(rawdata)
    {'encoding': 'EUC-JP', 'confidence': 0.99}

### Advanced usage

If you're dealing with a large amount of text, you can call the Universal Encoding Detector library incrementally, and it will stop as soon as it is confident enough to report its results.

Create a `UniversalDetector` object, then call its `feed` method repeatedly with each block of text. If the detector reaches a minimum threshold of confidence, it will set `detector.done` to `True`.

Once you've exhausted the source text, call `detector.close()`, which will do some final calculations in case the detector didn't hit its minimum confidence threshold earlier. Then `detector.result` will be a dictionary containing the auto-detected character encoding and confidence level (the same as the `chardet.detect` function returns).

### Example: Detecting encoding incrementally

    import urllib
    from chardet.universaldetector import UniversalDetector

    usock = urllib.urlopen('http://yahoo.co.jp/')
    detector = UniversalDetector()
    for line in usock.readlines():
        detector.feed(line)
        if detector.done: break
    detector.close()
    usock.close()
    print detector.result

    {'encoding': 'EUC-JP', 'confidence': 0.99}

If you want to detect the encoding of multiple texts (such as separate files), you can re-use a single `UniversalDetector` object. Just call `detector.reset()` at the start of each file, call `detector.feed` as many times as you like, and then call `detector.close()` and check the `detector.result` dictionary for the file's results.

### Example: Detecting encodings of multiple files

    import glob
    from charset.universaldetector import UniversalDetector

    detector = UniversalDetector()
    for filename in glob.glob('*.xml'):
        print filename.ljust(60),
        detector.reset()
        for line in file(filename, 'rb'):
            detector.feed(line)
            if detector.done: break
        detector.close()
        print detector.result

← Supported encodings
How it works →