libguess

A high-speed character set detection library

A high-speed character set detection library libguess has two functions: libguess_determine_encoding(const char *inbuf, int length, const char *region); This detects a character set. Returns an appropriate charset name that can be passed to iconv_open(). Region is the name of the language or region that the data is related to, e.g. 'Baltic' for the Baltic states, or 'Japanese' for Japan. libguess_validate_utf8(const char *inbuf, int length); This employs libguess's DFA-based character set validation rules to ensure that a string is pure UTF-8. GLib's UTF-8 validation functions are broken, for example. Just include libguess.h and link to libguess to get these functions in your program. For your convenience, a pkg-config file is also supplied. libguess employs discrete-finite automata to deduce the character set of the input buffer. The advantage of this is that all character sets can be checked in parallel, and quickly. Right now, libguess passes a byte to each DFA on the same pass, meaning that the winning character set can be deduced as efficiently as possible. libguess is fully reentrant, using only local stack memory for DFA operations.