split lines from stdin into a list of unicode strings

[Kurt Mueller]

Am 29.08.2013 11:12, schrieb Peter Otten:
> kurt.alfred.mueller at gmail.com wrote:
>> On Wednesday, August 28, 2013 1:13:36 PM UTC+2, Dave Angel wrote:
>>> On 28/8/2013 04:32, Kurt Mueller wrote:
>>>> For some text manipulation tasks I need a template to split lines
>>>> from stdin into a list of strings the way shlex.split() does it.
>>>> The encoding of the input can vary.

> You can compromise and read ahead a limited number of lines. Here's my demo 
> script (The interesting part is detect_encoding(), I got a bit distracted by 
> unrelated stuff...). The script does one extra decode/encode cycle -- it 
> should be easy to avoid that if you run into performance issues.

Thanks Peter!

I see the idea. It limits the buffersize/memory usage for the detection.


I have to say that I am a bit disapointed by the chardet library.
The encoding for the single character 'ü'
is detected as {'confidence': 0.99, 'encoding': 'EUC-JP'},
whereas "file" says:
$ echo "ü" | file -i -
/dev/stdin: text/plain; charset=utf-8
$

"ü" is a character I use very often, as it is in my name: "Müller":-)


I try to use the "python-magic" library which has a similar functionality
as chardet and is used by the "file" unix-command and it is expandable
with a magicfile, see "man file".


My magic_test script:
-------------------------------------------------------------------
#!/usr/bin/env python
# vim: set fileencoding=utf-8 :
from __future__ import print_function
import magic
strg_chck = 'ü'
magc_enco = magic.open( magic.MAGIC_MIME_ENCODING )
magc_enco.load()
print( strg_chck + ' encoding=' + magc_enco.buffer( strg_chck ) )
magc_enco.close()
-------------------------------------------------------------------
$ magic_test
ü encoding=utf-8

python-magic seems to me a bit more reliable.


Cheers
-- 
Kurt Mueller