How to reliably guess the encoding between MacRoman, CP1252, Latin1, UTF-8, and ASCII

First, the easy cases:

ASCII

If your data contains no bytes above 0x7F, then it's ASCII. (Or a 7-bit ISO646 encoding, but those are very obsolete.)

UTF-8

If your data validates as UTF-8, then you can safely assume it is UTF-8. Due to UTF-8's strict validation rules, false positives are extremely rare.

ISO-8859-1 vs. windows-1252

The only difference between these two encodings is that ISO-8859-1 has the C1 control characters where windows-1252 has the printable characters €‚ƒ„…†‡ˆ‰Š‹ŒŽ‘’“”•–—˜™š›œžŸ. I've seen plenty of files that use curly quotes or dashes, but none that use C1 control characters. So don't even bother with them, or ISO-8859-1, just detect windows-1252 instead.

That now leaves you with only one question.

How do you distinguish MacRoman from cp1252?

This is a lot trickier.

Undefined characters

The bytes 0x81, 0x8D, 0x8F, 0x90, 0x9D are not used in windows-1252. If they occur, then assume the data is MacRoman.

Identical characters

The bytes 0xA2 (¢), 0xA3 (£), 0xA9 (©), 0xB1 (±), 0xB5 (µ) happen to be the same in both encodings. If these are the only non-ASCII bytes, then it doesn't matter whether you choose MacRoman or cp1252.

Statistical approach

Count character (NOT byte!) frequencies in the data you know to be UTF-8. Determine the most frequent characters. Then use this data to determine whether the cp1252 or MacRoman characters are more common.

For example, in a search I just performed on 100 random English Wikipedia articles, the most common non-ASCII characters are ·•–é°®’èö—. Based on this fact,

• The bytes 0x92, 0x95, 0x96, 0x97, 0xAE, 0xB0, 0xB7, 0xE8, 0xE9, or 0xF6 suggest windows-1252.
• The bytes 0x8E, 0x8F, 0x9A, 0xA1, 0xA5, 0xA8, 0xD0, 0xD1, 0xD5, or 0xE1 suggest MacRoman.

Count up the cp1252-suggesting bytes and the MacRoman-suggesting bytes, and go with whichever is greatest.

Mozilla nsUniversalDetector (Perl bindings: Encode::Detect/Encode::Detect::Detector) is millionfold proven.

My attempt at such a heuristic (assuming that you've ruled out ASCII and UTF-8):

• If 0x7f to 0x9f don't appear at all, it's probably ISO-8859-1, because those are very rarely used control codes.
• If 0x91 through 0x94 appear at lot, it's probably Windows-1252, because those are the "smart quotes", by far the most likely characters in that range to be used in English text. To be more certain, you could look for pairs.
• Otherwise, it's MacRoman, especially if you see a lot of 0xd2 through 0xd5 (that's where the typographic quotes are in MacRoman).

Side note:

For files like Java source where no such facility exists internal to the file, you will put the encoding before the extension, such as SomeClass-utf8.java

Do not do this!!

The Java compiler expects file names to match class names, so renaming the files will render the source code uncompilable. The correct thing would be to guess the encoding, then use the native2ascii tool to convert all non-ASCII characters to Unicode escape sequences.