From: Paul Battley <pbattley@...>
Date: 2006-07-10T20:09:19+09:00
Subject: Re: Text encodings

On 10/07/06, xTRiM <rtokarev@gmail.com> wrote:
> is there any way, to detect text encoding?
> For example, is it in utf8, or in win1251, or something else.

You can't detect one-byte-per-character encodings easily (i.e. without
statistical analysis) but you can easily tell if something's UTF-8 or
not:

class String
  def is_utf8?
    unpack('U*')
    return true
  rescue
    return false
  end
end

"foo".is_utf8? #=> true
"foo\303".is_utf8? #=> false

Not the most efficient way, necessarily, but probably the easiest.

Paul.