Question

I use chardet for recognize my file encoding, but this error happend :

fh= open("file", mode="r")
sc= chardet.detect(fh)

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/home/alireza/test.py", line 19, in <module>
    sc= chardet.detect(fh)
  File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/chardet/__init__.py", line 24, in detect
    u.feed(aBuf)
  File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/chardet/universaldetector.py", line 65, in feed
    aLen = len(aBuf)
TypeError: object of type '_io.TextIOWrapper' has no len()

and i can’t open file with out know the encoding,

fh= open("file", mode="r").read()
sc= chardet.detect(fh)

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/home/alireza/workspacee/makecdown/test.py", line 21, in <module>
    fh= open("910.srt", mode="r").read()
  File "/usr/lib/python3.2/codecs.py", line 300, in decode
    (result, consumed) = self._buffer_decode(data, self.errors, final)
UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf-8' codec can't decode byte 0xc7 in position 34: invalid continuation byte

how to use chardet without open file ?! or any way to find out file encoding after/before opening ?

Answer 1

Try opening the file like this

fh= open("file", mode="rb")

Command Line Tool

If this does not work, try the command line tool of chardet.
Description from https://github.com/erikrose/chardet:

chardet comes with a command-line script which reports on the
encodings of one or more files:

% chardetect.py somefile someotherfile
somefile: windows-1252 with confidence 0.5
someotherfile: ascii with confidence 1.0