Character encoding aliases for legacy web content
This is a Python implementation of the WHATWG Encoding standard <http://encoding.spec.whatwg.org/>
_.
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.