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You can't just assume UTF-8
How to infer character encodings with statistics
Often you can also tell which language the document is in as well this way - that's one way that web browsers know to pop up the "do you want to translate this page" dialogue box. There is a definite sense that auto-detecting text encoding is an instance of Postel's Law: "be conservative in what you do, be liberal in what you accept from others". Perhaps there is a case to be made that csvbase's auto-detection should be a more explicit user interface action than a pre-selected combo-box.
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