How to detect the character encoding of a file in Java?

Question

Good day,

Our application receives files from our users, and those files must be validated if they are of the encoding type that we support (i.e. UTF-8, Shift-JIS, EUC-JP), and once that file is validated, we would also need to save that file in our system and its encoding as meta-data.

Currently, we're using JCharDet (which is a java port of mozilla's character detector), but there are some Shift-JIS characters that it seems to fail to detect as valid Shift-JIS characters.

Any ideas what else we can use?

Thanks, Franz

Answer 1

Apache Tika is a content analysis toolkit that is mainly useful for determining file types — as opposed to encoding schemes — but it does returns content encoding information for text file types. I don't know if its algorithms are as advanced as JCharDet, but it might be worth a try...