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

To return the encoding with the highest confidence:

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

To return the full list of possible encodings:

var chardet = require('chardet');
chardet.detectAll(Buffer.alloc('hello there!'));
// or
chardet.detectFileAll('/path/to/file', function(err, encoding) {});
// or
chardet.detectFileAllSync('/path/to/file');
//Returned value 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'}]

# 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) {});

# 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.