Question

Is it possible to check in Python whether a given charset exists/is installed. For example:
check(‘iso-8859-1’) -> True
check(‘bla’) -> False

Answer 1

You can use the lookup() function in the codecs module. It throws an exception if a codec does not exist:

import codecs def exists_encoding(enc):     try:         codecs.lookup(enc)     except LookupError:         return False     return True exists_encoding('latin1')