Java : How to determine the correct charset encoding of a stream

check this out: http://site.icu-project.org/ (icu4j) they have libraries for detecting charset from IOStream could be simple like this:

BufferedInputStream bis = new BufferedInputStream(input);
CharsetDetector cd = new CharsetDetector();
cd.setText(bis);
CharsetMatch cm = cd.detect();

if (cm != null) {
   reader = cm.getReader();
   charset = cm.getName();
}else {
   throw new UnsupportedCharsetException()
}

Here are my favorites:

TikaEncodingDetector

Dependency:

<dependency>
  <groupId>org.apache.any23</groupId>
  <artifactId>apache-any23-encoding</artifactId>
  <version>1.1</version>
</dependency>

Sample:

public static Charset guessCharset(InputStream is) throws IOException {
  return Charset.forName(new TikaEncodingDetector().guessEncoding(is));    
}

GuessEncoding

Dependency:

<dependency>
  <groupId>org.codehaus.guessencoding</groupId>
  <artifactId>guessencoding</artifactId>
  <version>1.4</version>
  <type>jar</type>
</dependency>

Sample:

  public static Charset guessCharset2(File file) throws IOException {
    return CharsetToolkit.guessEncoding(file, 4096, StandardCharsets.UTF_8);
  }

You can certainly validate the file for a particular charset by decoding it with a CharsetDecoder and watching out for "malformed-input" or "unmappable-character" errors. Of course, this only tells you if a charset is wrong; it doesn't tell you if it is correct. For that, you need a basis of comparison to evaluate the decoded results, e.g. do you know beforehand if the characters are restricted to some subset, or whether the text adheres to some strict format? The bottom line is that charset detection is guesswork without any guarantees.

Which library to use?

As of this writing, they are three libraries that emerge:

• GuessEncoding
• ICU4j
• juniversalchardet

I don't include Apache Any23 because it uses ICU4j 3.4 under the hood.

How to tell which one has detected the right charset (or as close as possible)?

It's impossible to certify the charset detected by each above libraries. However, it's possible to ask them in turn and score the returned response.

How to score the returned response?

Each response can be assigned one point. The more points a response have, the more confidence the detected charset has. This is a simple scoring method. You can elaborate others.

Is there any sample code?

Here is a full snippet implementing the strategy described in the previous lines.

public static String guessEncoding(InputStream input) throws IOException {
    // Load input data
    long count = 0;
    int n = 0, EOF = -1;
    byte[] buffer = new byte[4096];
    ByteArrayOutputStream output = new ByteArrayOutputStream();

    while ((EOF != (n = input.read(buffer))) && (count <= Integer.MAX_VALUE)) {
        output.write(buffer, 0, n);
        count += n;
    }
    
    if (count > Integer.MAX_VALUE) {
        throw new RuntimeException("Inputstream too large.");
    }

    byte[] data = output.toByteArray();

    // Detect encoding
    Map<String, int[]> encodingsScores = new HashMap<>();

    // * GuessEncoding
    updateEncodingsScores(encodingsScores, new CharsetToolkit(data).guessEncoding().displayName());

    // * ICU4j
    CharsetDetector charsetDetector = new CharsetDetector();
    charsetDetector.setText(data);
    charsetDetector.enableInputFilter(true);
    CharsetMatch cm = charsetDetector.detect();
    if (cm != null) {
        updateEncodingsScores(encodingsScores, cm.getName());
    }

    // * juniversalchardset
    UniversalDetector universalDetector = new UniversalDetector(null);
    universalDetector.handleData(data, 0, data.length);
    universalDetector.dataEnd();
    String encodingName = universalDetector.getDetectedCharset();
    if (encodingName != null) {
        updateEncodingsScores(encodingsScores, encodingName);
    }

    // Find winning encoding
    Map.Entry<String, int[]> maxEntry = null;
    for (Map.Entry<String, int[]> e : encodingsScores.entrySet()) {
        if (maxEntry == null || (e.getValue()[0] > maxEntry.getValue()[0])) {
            maxEntry = e;
        }
    }

    String winningEncoding = maxEntry.getKey();
    //dumpEncodingsScores(encodingsScores);
    return winningEncoding;
}

private static void updateEncodingsScores(Map<String, int[]> encodingsScores, String encoding) {
    String encodingName = encoding.toLowerCase();
    int[] encodingScore = encodingsScores.get(encodingName);

    if (encodingScore == null) {
        encodingsScores.put(encodingName, new int[] { 1 });
    } else {
        encodingScore[0]++;
    }
}    

private static void dumpEncodingsScores(Map<String, int[]> encodingsScores) {
    System.out.println(toString(encodingsScores));
}

private static String toString(Map<String, int[]> encodingsScores) {
    String GLUE = ", ";
    StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();

    for (Map.Entry<String, int[]> e : encodingsScores.entrySet()) {
        sb.append(e.getKey() + ":" + e.getValue()[0] + GLUE);
    }
    int len = sb.length();
    sb.delete(len - GLUE.length(), len);

    return "{ " + sb.toString() + " }";
}

Improvements: The guessEncoding method reads the inputstream entirely. For large inputstreams this can be a concern. All these libraries would read the whole inputstream. This would imply a large time consumption for detecting the charset.

It's possible to limit the initial data loading to a few bytes and perform the charset detection on those few bytes only.

The libs above are simple BOM detectors which of course only work if there is a BOM in the beginning of the file. Take a look at http://jchardet.sourceforge.net/ which does scans the text