This is a Python implementation of the WHATWG Encoding standard.

• Latest documentation: http://packages.python.org/webencodings/
• Source code and issue tracker: https://github.com/gsnedders/python-webencodings
• PyPI releases: http://pypi.python.org/pypi/webencodings
• License: BSD
• Python 2.6+ and 3.3+

In order to be compatible with legacy web content when interpreting something like Content-Type: text/html; charset=latin1, tools need to use a particular set of aliases for encoding labels as well as some overriding rules. For example, US-ASCII and iso-8859-1 on the web are actually aliases for windows-1252, and an UTF-8 or UTF-16 BOM takes precedence over any other encoding declaration. The Encoding standard defines all such details so that implementations do not have to reverse-engineer each other.

This module has encoding labels and BOM detection, but the actual implementation for encoders and decoders is Python’s.