O wise monks,

Let's say I want to process some text whose encoding is uncertain, except that it is probably text, and probably in a Western (1 byte character) language. I want to do some text processing on it such as, extract all words from it. Before doing anything, I want to use 

Encode::from_to($line,"$probable_encoding",''iso-8859-1'')

[download]

to put everything into iso-8859-1 in (probable) good form.

Is there anything I can use that will give me the "probable encoding" for a file / string / whatever?

I was led in this direction by the venerable Thundergnat's answer to my

matching german characters output from system call.

where he suggested I run Encode::from_to($latinresult, 'cp437', 'iso-8859-1'); before matching the output of a system call on my german WinXP box. But how did he know to use 'cp437'?

UPDATE: Thanks monks, Encode::Guess looks good. I'm going to go try it out.

In reply to What encoding am I (probably) using? by tphyahoo

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