Installation

This installs a package that can be used from Python (import charset_normalizer).

To install for all users on the system, administrator rights (root) may be required.

Using PIP

Charset Normalizer can be installed from pip:

pip install charset-normalizer

You may enable extra feature unicode data v12 backport as follow:

pip install charset-normalizer[UnicodeDataBackport]

From git via master

You can install from dev-master branch using git:

git clone https://github.com/Ousret/charset_normalizer.git
cd charset_normalizer/
python setup.py install

Basic Usage

The new way

You may want to get right to it.

from charset_normalizer import CharsetNormalizerMatches as CnM

# This is going to print out your sequence once properly decoded
print(
    CnM.from_bytes(
        my_byte_str
    ).best().first()
)

# You could also want the same from a file
print(
    CnM.from_path(
        './data/sample.1.ar.srt'
    ).best().first()
)

Backward compatibility

If you were used to python chardet, we are providing the very same detect() method as chardet.

from charset_normalizer import detect

# This will behave exactly the same as python chardet
result = detect(my_byte_str)

if result['encoding'] is not None:
    print('got', result['encoding'], 'as detected encoding')

You may upgrade your code with ease. CTRL + R from chardet import detect to from charset_normalizer import detect.