How to detect string byte encoding?

Question

I've got about 1000 filenames read by os.listdir(), some of them are encoded in UTF8 and some are CP1252.

I want to decode all of them to Unicode for further processing in my script. Is there a way to get the source encoding to correctly decode into Unicode?

Example:

for item in os.listdir(rootPath):

    #Convert to Unicode
    if isinstance(item, str):
        item = item.decode('cp1252')  # or item = item.decode('utf-8')
    print item

Answer 1

Use chardet library. It is super easy

import chardet

the_encoding = chardet.detect('your string')['encoding']

and that's it!