Chardet is a character detection module for NodeJS written in pure Javascript. Module is based on ICU project http://site.icu-project.org/, which uses character occurency analysis to determine the most probable encoding.

Installation

npm i chardet

Usage

var chardet = require('chardet');
chardet.detect(new Buffer('hello there!'));
// or
chardet.detectFile('/path/to/file', function(err, encoding) {});
// or
chardet.detectFileSync('/path/to/file');

Working with large data sets

Sometimes, when data set is huge and you want to optimize performace (in tradeoff of less accuracy), you can sample only first N bytes of the buffer:

chardet.detectFile('/path/to/file', { sampleSize: 32 }, function(err, encoding) {});

Supported Encodings:

UTF-8
UTF-16 LE
UTF-16 BE
UTF-32 LE
UTF-32 BE
ISO-2022-JP
ISO-2022-KR
ISO-2022-CN
Shift-JIS
Big5
EUC-JP
EUC-KR
GB18030
ISO-8859-1
ISO-8859-2
ISO-8859-5
ISO-8859-6
ISO-8859-7
ISO-8859-8
ISO-8859-9
windows-1250
windows-1251
windows-1252
windows-1253
windows-1254
windows-1255
windows-1256
KOI8-R

Currently only these encodings are supported, more will be added soon.