chardet/chardet

Health v2 · maintenance only

Adoption not part of the score

2661 stars · 306 forks observed · 2026-08-28

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-30, confidence not recorded

chardet is a Python library that detects the character encoding of byte data, with language and MIME type detection included. Version 7 is a fast, 0BSD-licensed rewrite that is a drop-in replacement for earlier chardet releases with zero runtime dependencies.

Use cases

• detect the encoding of a text file before decoding it
• identify character sets in scraped web content
• normalize mixed-encoding data during ETL pipelines
• detect language of text alongside its encoding
• identify MIME type of binary files
• stream-detect encoding of large files without loading them fully

When to choose

• you need high-accuracy encoding detection in Python
• you want a permissive 0BSD license instead of LGPL
• you need fast detection on large inputs or streaming data
• you want language detection bundled with encoding detection

When to avoid

• you only handle UTF-8 input and can skip detection entirely
• you need detection outside Python
• you prefer charset-normalizer's API ecosystem

Facets

library · maturity active

parser nlp developer-tools developer-tools files python cross-platform character-encoding charset-detection unicode text-processing drop-in-replacement natural-language-processing

Member repositories

For agents

markdown · JSON · MCP: product_card(name="chardet/chardet")