Ude is a C# port of Mozilla Universal Charset Detector.

The article "A composite approach to language/encoding detection" describes the charsets detection algorithms implemented by the library.

Ude can recognize the following charsets:

• UTF-8
• UTF-16 (BE and LE)
• UTF-32 (BE and LE)
• windows-1252 (mostly equivalent to iso8859-1)
• windows-1251 and ISO-8859-5 (cyrillic)
• windows-1253 and ISO-8859-7 (greek)
• windows-1255 (logical hebrew. Includes ISO-8859-8-I and most of x-mac-hebrew)
• ISO-8859-8 (visual hebrew)
• Big-5
• gb18030 (superset of gb2312)
• HZ-GB-2312
• Shift-JIS
• EUC-KR, EUC-JP, EUC-TW
• ISO-2022-JP, ISO-2022-KR, ISO-2022-CN
• KOI8-R
• x-mac-cyrillic
• IBM855 and IBM866
• X-ISO-10646-UCS-4-3412 and X-ISO-10646-UCS-4-2413 (unusual BOM)
• ASCII

Platform

Windows and Linux (Mono)

Install

The release consists in the main library (Ude.dll) and a command-line client (udetect.exe) that can be used for one-shot tests.

On Windows, compile the Visual Studio 2005 solution ude.sln. On Linux you can build the library, the example and the nunit tests with monodelop and its solution ude.mds, or using make. To compile the sources tarball:

$ ./configure.sh --prefix=/usr/local --enable-tests=yes
$ make

To compile from svn:

$ ./autogen.sh --prefix=/usr/local --enable-tests=yes $ make

You can pick the library (Ude.dll) from the toplevel build directory (./bin) or you can install it to $prefix/lib/ude by typing:

$ make install

This will installs a command-line example program ($prefix/bin/udetect) to test the library on a given file as:

$ udetect filename To run the nunit tests type:

$ make test

Usage

Example

public static void Main(String[] args)
{
    string filename = args[0];
    using (FileStream fs = File.OpenRead(filename)) {
        Ude.CharsetDetector cdet = new Ude.CharsetDetector();
        cdet.Feed(fs);
        cdet.DataEnd();
        if (cdet.Charset != null) {
            Console.WriteLine("Charset: {0}, confidence: {1}", 
                 cdet.Charset, cdet.Confidence);
        } else {
            Console.WriteLine("Detection failed.");
        }
    }
}    

Other portings

The original Mozilla Universal Charset Detector has been ported to a variety of languages. Among these, a Java port:

• juniversalchardet

from which I copied a few data structures, and a Python port:

• chardet

License

The library is subject to the Mozilla Public License Version 1.1 (the "License"). Alternatively, it may be used under the terms of either the GNU General Public License Version 2 or later (the "GPL"), or the GNU Lesser General Public License Version 2.1 or later (the "LGPL").

Test data has been extracted from Wikipedia and The Project Gutenberg books and is subject to their licenses.