cChardet

cChardet is high speed universal character encoding detector. - binding to uchardet.

This fork (faust-cchardet) vs PyYoshi/cChardet

This is the faust-streaming maintained fork of upstream PyYoshi/cChardet. It exists mainly to keep the project building on current Python and Windows toolchains and to publish up-to-date prebuilt wheels across platforms. The public Python API is unchanged from upstream.

The distribution is renamed on PyPI; the import name is not:

pip install faust-cchardet

import cchardet   # same import name as upstream

Key differences

• Prebuilt wheels built with cibuildwheel, so most users install without a C++ compiler:
  • Linux: x86_64, i686, aarch64 (CPython and PyPy)
  • macOS: x86_64, arm64
  • Windows: x86_64 / AMD64
• Windows / MSVC support — pinned to an MSVC-compatible uchardet (bdb8a0…) so the C++ extension compiles under Microsoft Visual C++. Upstream's newer uchardet header does not build under MSVC.
• Modern build — uses the meson-python build backend (distutils is removed in Python 3.12+); Meson builds the Cython output as C++ and links the matching C++ runtime automatically.
• Versioning — the version lives in src/cchardet/version.py and is exposed as cchardet.__version__ (upstream uses setuptools_scm).
• Python support — requires Python >= 3.10 (3.6–3.9 are dropped).

Detection differences (a consequence of the pinned uchardet)

• A UTF-8 byte-order mark is reported as UTF-8-SIG (upstream reports UTF-8).
• On 32-bit (i686) builds a few near-equivalent labels differ — e.g. Thai TIS-620 is detected as ISO-8859-11.

Supported Languages/Encodings

• International (Unicode)
  • UTF-8
  • UTF-16BE / UTF-16LE
  • UTF-32BE / UTF-32LE / X-ISO-10646-UCS-4-34121 / X-ISO-10646-UCS-4-21431
• Arabic
  • ISO-8859-6
  • WINDOWS-1256
• Bulgarian
  • ISO-8859-5
  • WINDOWS-1251
• Chinese
  • ISO-2022-CN
  • BIG5
  • EUC-TW
  • GB18030
  • HZ-GB-2312
• Croatian:
  • ISO-8859-2
  • ISO-8859-13
  • ISO-8859-16
  • Windows-1250
  • IBM852
  • MAC-CENTRALEUROPE
• Czech
  • Windows-1250
  • ISO-8859-2
  • IBM852
  • MAC-CENTRALEUROPE
• Danish
  • ISO-8859-1
  • ISO-8859-15
  • WINDOWS-1252
• English
  • ASCII
• Esperanto
  • ISO-8859-3
• Estonian
  • ISO-8859-4
  • ISO-8859-13
  • ISO-8859-13
  • Windows-1252
  • Windows-1257
• Finnish
  • ISO-8859-1
  • ISO-8859-4
  • ISO-8859-9
  • ISO-8859-13
  • ISO-8859-15
  • WINDOWS-1252
• French
  • ISO-8859-1
  • ISO-8859-15
  • WINDOWS-1252
• German
  • ISO-8859-1
  • WINDOWS-1252
• Greek
  • ISO-8859-7
  • WINDOWS-1253
• Hebrew
  • ISO-8859-8
  • WINDOWS-1255
• Hungarian:
  • ISO-8859-2
  • WINDOWS-1250
• Irish Gaelic
  • ISO-8859-1
  • ISO-8859-9
  • ISO-8859-15
  • WINDOWS-1252
• Italian
  • ISO-8859-1
  • ISO-8859-3
  • ISO-8859-9
  • ISO-8859-15
  • WINDOWS-1252
• Japanese
  • ISO-2022-JP
  • SHIFT_JIS
  • EUC-JP
• Korean
  • ISO-2022-KR
  • EUC-KR / UHC
• Lithuanian
  • ISO-8859-4
  • ISO-8859-10
  • ISO-8859-13
• Latvian
  • ISO-8859-4
  • ISO-8859-10
  • ISO-8859-13
• Maltese
  • ISO-8859-3
• Polish:
  • ISO-8859-2
  • ISO-8859-13
  • ISO-8859-16
  • Windows-1250
  • IBM852
  • MAC-CENTRALEUROPE
• Portuguese
  • ISO-8859-1
  • ISO-8859-9
  • ISO-8859-15
  • WINDOWS-1252
• Romanian:
  • ISO-8859-2
  • ISO-8859-16
  • Windows-1250
  • IBM852
• Russian
  • ISO-8859-5
  • KOI8-R
  • WINDOWS-1251
  • MAC-CYRILLIC
  • IBM866
  • IBM855
• Slovak
  • Windows-1250
  • ISO-8859-2
  • IBM852
  • MAC-CENTRALEUROPE
• Slovene
  • ISO-8859-2
  • ISO-8859-16
  • Windows-1250
  • IBM852
  • MAC-CENTRALEUROPE

Example

One-shot detection

import cchardet as chardet

with open(r"src/tests/samples/wikipediaJa_One_Thousand_and_One_Nights_SJIS.txt", "rb") as f:
    msg = f.read()
    result = chardet.detect(msg)
    print(result)

Streaming detection

import cchardet

detector = cchardet.UniversalDetector()
with open("bigfile.txt", "rb") as f:
    for line in f:
        detector.feed(line)
        if detector.done:
            break
detector.close()
print(detector.result)

Command line

A cchardetect console script is installed with the package:

$ cchardetect src/tests/samples/wikipediaJa_One_Thousand_and_One_Nights_SJIS.txt
src/tests/samples/wikipediaJa_One_Thousand_and_One_Nights_SJIS.txt: SHIFT_JIS with confidence 0.99

$ cat somefile.txt | cchardetect        # also reads from stdin

Benchmark

$ pip install -e .
$ python src/tests/bench.py

Results

CPU: AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D

RAM: DDR5-5600MT/s 96GB

Platform: Ubuntu 24.04 amd64

Python 3.12.3

LICENSE

See COPYING file.

Contact

• Issues

Support Platforms

Prebuilt wheels are published for:

• Windows x86_64 (AMD64)
• Linux x86_64, i686, aarch64
• macOS x86_64, arm64