chardet: Universal Character Encoding Detector

7.4.0.post1 · active · verified Sat Mar 28

chardet is a Python library that detects the character encoding of byte strings, providing the detected encoding, confidence score, and language. The current version is 7.4.0.post1, released on March 14, 2026. It is actively maintained with regular updates, focusing on improving accuracy and performance. The library requires Python 3.10 or higher and has zero runtime dependencies, making it suitable for various Python environments, including PyPy.

Warnings

breaking chardet 7.0 is a ground-up, MIT-licensed rewrite — same package name, same public API — drop-in replacement for chardet 5.x/6.x. Python 3.10+, zero runtime dependencies, works on PyPy.
Fix: Update to chardet 7.0 or later to ensure compatibility and benefit from improved performance and accuracy.
deprecated chardet 7.0.0 introduced a new dense zlib-compressed model format (v2) that significantly reduces cold start times. Ensure your environment supports this format for optimal performance.
Fix: Verify that your environment is compatible with the new model format to take advantage of the performance improvements.

Install

pip install chardet Install chardet

Imports

detect
```
from chardet import detect
```
Ensure 'detect' is imported from 'chardet' to access the detection function.

Quickstart

Use the 'detect' function from the 'chardet' module to analyze byte strings and determine their encoding.

import chardet

# Detect encoding of a byte string
result = chardet.detect(b'Hello, world!')
print(result)
# Output: {'encoding': 'ascii', 'confidence': 1.0, 'language': 'en'}

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