About

EncodingSleuth Text is a simple and powerful Java API your programs can use to determine whether a byte stream or file contains encoded text, and to identify the best charset/decoder to use to decode those bytes into text.

EncodingSleuth Text version 1 has these features:

• It works with Unicode versions 4.1.0, 5.0.0, and 5.1.0 (all three versions are included). It also can work with custom Unicode versions you provide.
• It works with a list of potential charsets configured by your program, improving efficiency by letting you eliminate charsets you will never need.
• It provides several detectors which analyze different aspects of each potential decoding in order to rank them according to which is best. Your program may use any or all of the detectors, or even create custom detectors, in order to achieve the best results for your application.
• It provides your program with a scored list of potential decoders for your data. The list order is based on the relative "goodness" of each decoder for decoding the bytes; the best decoder is at the top of the list.

For details, see Theory of Operation .