If you're just trying to tell the difference between those two encodings, then note that a lot of text encoded with Latin1 is not valid UTF-8, so simply attempting to decode it as UTF-8 will already give you a very good hint. I demonstrated this with some code (plus heuristics) in this node.

In reply to Re: Perl detect utf8, iso-8859-1 encoding by haukex
in thread Perl detect utf8, iso-8859-1 encoding by swiftlet

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