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 retrieve the latest unicodedata backport as follow:

pip install charset-normalizer[unicode_backport]

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 from_bytes, from_path

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

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

Backward compatibility

If you were used to python chardet, we are providing the very same detect() method as chardet. This function is mostly backward-compatible with Chardet. The migration should be painless.

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.