chardet

Chardet is a character detection module for NodeJS written in pure Javascript. Module is based on ICU project http://site.icu-project.org/, which uses character occurency analysis to determine the most probable encoding.

Installation

npm i chardet

Usage

var chardet = require('chardet');
chardet.detect(new Buffer('hello there!'));
// or
chardet.detectFile('/path/to/file', function(err, encoding) {});
// or
chardet.detectFileSync('/path/to/file');

Working with large data sets

Sometimes, when data set is huge and you want to optimize performace (in tradeoff of less accuracy), you can sample only first N bytes of the buffer:

chardet.detectFile('/path/to/file', { sampleSize: 32 }, function(err, encoding) {});

Returning more detailed results

If you wish to see the full list of possible encodings:

chardet.detectFile('/path/to/file', { returnAllMatches: true }, function(err, encodings) {
  //encodings is an array of objects sorted by confidence value in decending order
  //e.g. [{ confidence: 90, name: 'UTF-8'}, {confidence: 20, name: 'windows-1252', lang: 'fr'}]
});

Supported Encodings:

• UTF-8
• UTF-16 LE
• UTF-16 BE
• UTF-32 LE
• UTF-32 BE
• ISO-2022-JP
• ISO-2022-KR
• ISO-2022-CN
• Shift-JIS
• Big5
• EUC-JP
• EUC-KR
• GB18030
• ISO-8859-1
• ISO-8859-2
• ISO-8859-5
• ISO-8859-6
• ISO-8859-7
• ISO-8859-8
• ISO-8859-9
• windows-1250
• windows-1251
• windows-1252
• windows-1253
• windows-1254
• windows-1255
• windows-1256
• KOI8-R

Currently only these encodings are supported, more will be added soon.