Chared

Chared is a software tool which can detect character encoding of a text document provided the language of the document is known. The language of the text has to be specified as an input parameter so that the corresponding language model can be used. The package contains models for a wide range of languages (currently 57 --- covering all major languages). Furthermore, it provides a training script to learn models for additional languages using a set of user supplied sample html pages in the given language. The detection algorithm is based on determining similarity of byte trigrams vectors. In general, chared should be more accurate than other character encoding detection tools with no language constraints. This is an important advantage allowing precise character decoding needed for building large textual corpora. The tool has been used for building corpora in American Spanish, Arabic, Czech, French, Japanese, Russian, Tajik, and six Turkic languages consisting of 70 billions tokens altogether. Chared is an open source software, licensed under New BSD License and available for download (including the source code) at http://code.google.com/p/chared/. The research leading to this piece of software was published in POMIKÁLEK, Jan a Vít SUCHOMEL. chared: Character Encoding Detection with a Known Language. In Aleš Horák, Pavel Rychlý. RASLAN 2011. 5. vyd. Brno, Czech Republic: Tribun EU, 2011. od s. 125-129, 5 s. ISBN 978-80-263-0077-9.