Class Hierarchy for chardet

Universal Detector

Has a list of probers.

CharSetProber

Mostly abstract parent class.

CharSetGroupProber

Runs a bunch of related probers at the same time and decides which is best.

SBCSGroupProber

SBCS = Single-ByteCharSet. Runs a bunch of SingleByteCharSetProbers. Always contains the same SingleByteCharSetProbers.

SingleByteCharSetProber

A CharSetProber that is used for detecting single-byte encodings by using a "precedence matrix" (i.e., a character bigram model).

MBCSGroupProber

Runs a bunch of MultiByteCharSetProbers. It also uses a UTF8Prober, which is essentially a MultiByteCharSetProber that only has a state machine. Always contains the same MultiByteCharSetProbers.

MultiByteCharSetProber

A CharSetProber that uses both a character unigram model (or "character distribution analysis") and an independent state machine for trying to detect and encoding.

CodingStateMachine

Used for "coding scheme" detection, where we just look for either invalid byte sequences or sequences that only occur for that particular encoding.

CharDistributionAnalysis

Used for character unigram distribution encoding detection. Takes a mapping from characters to a "frequency order" (i.e., what frequency rank that byte has in the given encoding) and a "typical distribution ratio", which is the number of occurrences of the 512 most frequently used characters divided by the number of occurrences of the rest of the characters for a typical document. The "characters" in this case are 2-byte sequences and they are first converted to an "order" (name comes from ord() function, I believe). This "order" is used to index into the frequency order table to determine the frequency rank of that byte sequence. The reason this extra step is necessary is that the frequency rank table is language-specific (and not encoding-specific).

What's where

Bigram files

• hebrewprober.py
• jpcntxprober.py
• langbulgarianmodel.py
• langcyrillicmodel.py
• langgreekmodel.py
• langhebrewmodel.py
• langhungarianmodel.py
• langthaimodel.py
• latin1prober.py
• sbcharsetprober.py
• sbcsgroupprober.py

Coding Scheme files

• escprober.py
• escsm.py
• utf8prober.py
• codingstatemachine.py
• mbcssmprober.py

Unigram files

• big5freqprober.py
• chardistribution.py
• euckrfreqprober.py
• euctwfreqprober.py
• gb2312freqprober.py
• jisfreqprober.py

Multibyte probers

• big5prober.py
• cp949prober.py
• eucjpprober.py
• euckrprober.py
• euctwprober.py
• gb2312prober.py
• mbcharsetprober.py
• mbcsgroupprober.py
• sjisprober.py

Misc files

• __init__.py (currently has detect function in it)
• compat.py
• enums.py
• universaldetector.py
• version.py

Useful links

This is just a collection of information that I've found useful or thought might be useful in the future:

• BOM by Encoding
• A Composite Approach to Language/Encoding Detection
• What Every Programmer Absolutely...
• The actual source