I've had good luck years ago just duplicating the string a few times and throwing it at Mozilla's character set detection stuff (there's a "chardet" python libr

I've had good luck years ago just duplicating the string a few times and throwing it at Mozilla's character set detection stuff (there's a "chardet" python library implementing that, IIRC). My context was song metadata (title, artist, etc.) so your mileage might vary.