Detecting filename-encoding (on WinXP)?

[Christos Georgiou]

On 2 Feb 2006 08:03:14 -0800, rumours say that "Tim N. van der Leeuw"
<tim.leeuwvander at nl.unisys.com> might have written:

>So now what I need to know is, how do I find out in what encoding a
>particular filename is? Is there a portable way for doing this?

You said the filename comes as data, and not as contents of os.listdir(),
right?

You can only know (for almost certain) what encoding is *not* the filename
(by looping over encodings and marking those where .decode fails).  

If it was textual data, you could be more successful in guessing (btw, it's
been a long time since I requested example texts from various encodings for
my encoding-guessing app, but I was sent only one) by testing characters in
pairs and their frequencies.
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