No Longer Maintained

See https://github.com/chardet/chardet

Charade: The Universal character encoding detector

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, ISO-2022-JP (Japanese)
• EUC-KR, ISO-2022-KR (Korean)
• KOI8-R, MacCyrillic, IBM855, IBM866, ISO-8859-5, windows-1251 (Cyrillic)
• ISO-8859-2, windows-1250 (Hungarian)
• ISO-8859-5, windows-1251 (Bulgarian)
• windows-1252 (English)
• ISO-8859-7, windows-1253 (Greek)
• ISO-8859-8, windows-1255 (Visual and Logical Hebrew)
• TIS-620 (Thai)

Requires Python 2.6 or later

Command-line Tool

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

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

About

This is a port of Mark Pilgrim's excellent chardet. Previous two versions needed to be maintained: one that supported python 2.x and one that supported python 3.x. With the minor amount of work placed into this port, charade now supports both in one codebase.

The base for the work was Mark's last available copy of the chardet source for python 3000.

The Reason

Does everything have to have a reason? No, but in this case the reason was to help out requests and anyone else who sorely needed this.

What about x, y, or z?

If x, y, or z (a colloquialism for other projects that may do the same thing) do exist and indeed existed before charade, then I'm disappointed that they didn't make themselves better known. It would have saved me quite a few hours.