CHAPTER 15 ■ CASE STUDY: PORTING CHARDET TO PYTHON 3
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Auto-Encoding Algorithms
It turns out that that algorithms that detect character encoding exist; indeed, all major browsers have
character encoding auto-detection because the web is full of pages that have no encoding information
whatsoever. Mozilla Firefox contains an open source encoding auto-detection library. I ported the
library to Python 2 and dubbed it the chardet module. This chapter takes you step-by-step through
the process of porting the chardet module from Python 2 to Python 3.
Introducing the chardet Module
Before we set off porting the code, it would help if you understood how the original code worked! This is
a brief guide to navigating the code itself. The chardet
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