If you do not know what the character encoding is for a file you need to handle in Python, then try chardet. These all should be interpreted as "I don't know." chardet, the popular Python character detection library If using the more traditional and painful Microsoft Excel CSV format, the character encoding is likely "cp1252" which is a Latin encoding.īut what happens if the answer is "I don't know"? Or, more commonly, "we don't use character encoding" (🤦). If you are saving a CSV file from Microsoft Excel, know that the "CSV UTF-8" format uses the character encoding "utf-8-sig" (a beginning-of-message, or BOM, character is used to designate UTF-8 at the start of the file). This is usually the default in Python since version 3. If you are the one doing the encoding, select an appropriate version of Unicode, UTF-8 if you can. The easiest way is to have someone decide, and communicate clearly. As José so clearly discovered above.įor instance, dear Microsoft Excel often saves CSV files in a Latin encoding (unless you have a newer version and explicitly select UTF-8 CSV). While ubiquitous, UTF-8 is not the only character encoding. In other words, "a" is still encoded to a one-byte number 97. UTF-8, being variable width, is even backwards compatible with ASCII. This covers a wealth of characters, including ♲, 水, Ж, and even 😀. With UTF-8, a character may be encoded as a 1, 2, 3, or 4-byte number. It is used on this web page, and is the default encoding since Python version 3. One of these encodings, UTF-8, is common. You can see non-Ascii names such as "Miloš" and "María", as well as 张伟. Good thing that Unicode has happened, and there are character encodings that can represent a wide range of the characters used around the world.
#TEXT ENCODING DETECTOR FULL#
And, thankfully, the world is full of a wide range of people and languages. dominated computer industry, or simple short-sightedness, to put it kindly (ethnocentrist and complacent may be more descriptive and accurate, if less gracious). The problem is, of course, that if this situation ever did exist, it was the result of a then U.S. Once upon a time, everyone spoke "American" and character encoding was a simple translation of 127 characters to codes and back again (the ASCII character encoding, a subset of which is demonstrated above). It is a picture of another friend, who speaks Latin. ISO-8859-1 works if all you speak is Latin. So nice to have our friend back in one piece. No one will ever figure it out!Įnter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode Think of character encoding like a top secret substitution cipher, in which every letter has a corresponding number when encoded. Without the encoding, you aren't dealing with text and strings. Most likely (but not necessarily), your text editor or terminal will encode "a" as the number 97. The letter "a", for instance, must be recorded and processed like everything else: as a byte (or multiple bytes). If you are dealing with text and computers, then there has to be encoding.
#TEXT ENCODING DETECTOR SOFTWARE#
Unless only dealing with numerical data, any data jockey or software developer needs to face the problem of encoding and decoding characters.Įver heard or asked the question, "why do we need character encodings?" Indeed, character encodings cause heaps of confusion for software developer and end user alike.īut ponder for a moment, and we all have to admit that the "do we need character encoding?" question is nonsensical. Or, in some cases, Python will fail to convert the file to text at all, complaining with a UnicodeDecodeError. Yet, when dealing with text files, sometimes José will appear as José, or other mangled array of symbols and letters. If your name is José, you are in good company.
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