Finding the text which is having nonstandard character encoding is a very common step to perform in text processing.
All the text would have been from utf-8 or ASCII encoding ideally but this might not be the case always. So, in such cases when the encoding is not known, such non-encoded text has to be detected and the be converted to a standard encoding. So, this step is important before processing the text further.
Charade Installation :
For performing the detection and conversion of encoding, charade – a Python library is required. This module can be simply installed using sudo easy_install charade or pip install charade.
Let’s see the wrapper function around the charade module.
Code : encoding.detect(string), to detect the encoding
Python3
# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-import charadedef detect(s): try: # check it in the charade list if isinstance(s, str): return charade.detect(s.encode()) # detecting the string else: return charade.detect(s) # in case of error # encode with 'utf -8' encoding except UnicodeDecodeError: return charade.detect(s.encode('utf-8')) |
The detect functions will return 2 attributes :
Confidence : the probability of charade being correct. Encoding : which encoding it is.
Code : encoding.convert(string) to convert the encoding.
Python3
# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-import charadedef convert(s): # if in the charade instance if isinstance(s, str): s = s.encode() # retrieving the encoding information # from the detect() output encode = detect(s)['encoding'] if encode == 'utf-8': return s.decode() else: return s.decode(encoding) |
Code : Example
Python3
# importing libraryimport encodingd1 = encoding.detect('geek')print ("d1 is encoded as : ", d1)d2 = encoding.detect('ascii')print ("d2 is encoded as : ", d2) |
Output :
d1 is encoded as : (confidence': 0.505, 'encoding': 'utf-8')
d2 is encoded as : ('confidence': 1.0, 'encoding': 'ascii')
detect() : It is a charade.detect() wrapper. It encodes the strings and handles the UnicodeDecodeError exceptions. It expects a bytes object so therefore the string is encoded before trying to detect the encoding.
convert() : It is a charade.convert() wrapper. It calls detect() first to get the encoding. Then, it returns a decoded string.
