What should I use to read text files for which I don’t know their encoding (ASCII or Unicode)?
Is there some class that auto-detects the encoding?
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What should I use to read text files for which I don’t know their encoding (ASCII or Unicode)?
Is there some class that auto-detects the encoding?
I can only give a negative answer here: There is no universally correct way to determine the encoding of a file. An ASCII file can be read as a ISO-8859-15 encoding, because ASCII is a subset. Even worse for other files may be valid in two different encodings having different meanings in both. So you need to get this information via some other means. In many cases it is a good approach to just assume that everything is UTF8. If you are working on a *NIX environment the LC_CTYPE variable may be helpful. If you do not care about the encoding (e.g. you do not change or process the content) you can open files as binary.