I had a situation on the project that I’m working in wich I had to find in what encoding a certain string were in python. I looked for this on the net, but I didn’t find it. Rodrigo Belem gave me a help and we found how do it. Then I decided to blog it here.

So, just use the following method to discover the encoding of the string “s” in python:


def mydecode(s, encodings=('ascii', 'utf-8', 'latin1')):
for encoding in encodings:
try:
s.decode(encoding)
return encoding
except UnicodeDecodeError:
pass


I hope you enjoy it!