Unbaking mojibake

Question

When you decoded characters incorrectly, how do you determine the likely candidates for the original string?

Ä×èÈÄÄî▒è¤ô_üiâAâjâüâpâXüj_10òb.png

I know that there must have been some Japanese characters for this image file name. But with various hunches in urllib quoting / unquoting to encode and decode iso8859-1, utf8, I could not destroy and get the original file name.

Is corruption reversible?

Answer 1

You can use chardet (install with pip):

import chardet

your_str = "Ä×èÈÄÄî▒è¤ô_üiâAâjâüâpâXüj_10òb"
detected_encoding = chardet.detect(your_str)["encoding"]

try:
    correct_str = your_str.decode(detected_encoding)
except UnicodeDecodeError:
    print("Could not estimate encoding")

Result: 時間 試 験 観 点 (ア ニ メ パ ス) _10 秒 (I don’t know if this can be right or not)

For Python 3 (source file encoded as utf8):

import chardet
import codecs

falsely_decoded_str = "Ä×èÈÄÄî¦è¤ô_üiâAâjâüâpâXüj_10òb"

try:
    encoded_str = falsely_decoded_str.encode("cp850")
except UnicodeEncodeError:
    print("could not encode falsely decoded string")
    encoded_str = None

if encoded_str:
    detected_encoding = chardet.detect(encoded_str)["encoding"]

    try:
        correct_str = encoded_str.decode(detected_encoding)
    except UnicodeEncodeError:
        print("could not decode encoded_str as %s" % detected_encoding)

    with codecs.open("output.txt", "w", "utf-8-sig") as out:
        out.write(correct_str)