• Package: betto_charset_detector
• Version: 0.1.0
• Dart SDK: ≥ 3.13.0

1 Purpose and scope

betto_charset_detector is a standalone, pure-Dart package that detects the character encoding of an arbitrary byte sequence. It exposes a single top-level function, detectCharset, that accepts a Uint8List and returns a lowercase IANA encoding label string.

The package has no Flutter or native dependencies and is compatible with all Dart and Flutter target platforms: mobile (Android, iOS), web, and desktop (macOS, Windows, Linux).

2 Detection algorithm

Detection proceeds through three ordered stages. Each stage is cheaper and more reliable than the next; the pipeline falls through only when the current stage cannot make a determination.

2.1 Stage 1 — BOM inspection (deterministic)

A byte-order mark (BOM), when present, is authoritative. BOM checks are ordered longest-match first to correctly distinguish UTF-32 from UTF-16 (the first two bytes of the UTF-32 LE BOM, FF FE, are identical to the UTF-16 LE BOM).

2.2 Stage 2 — UTF-8 structural validation

A leading sample of the input (see Sampling) is decoded with dart:convert’s utf8.decode(allowMalformed: false). A successful decode means the content is UTF-8 (or pure ASCII, which is a strict UTF-8 subset). Returns utf-8.

Empty-input contract: An empty Uint8List passes UTF-8 validation and returns utf-8. This is the guaranteed behaviour — empty input is treated as vacuously valid UTF-8.

2.3 Stage 3 — Candidate probe

For legacy 8-bit and CJK encodings the static method Charset.canDecode(Encoding?, List<int>) from the charset package is used to test each candidate encoding against the sample.

CJK promotion heuristic: When more than 15% of sample bytes are ≥ 0x80, CJK candidates are promoted to the front of the probe order. This reduces false Western matches on CJK content with dense high-byte sequences.

Probe order (Western-first, i.e. ≤ 15% high bytes):

1. windows-1252
2. iso-8859-1
3. iso-8859-2
4. iso-8859-15
5. shift-jis
6. euc-jp
7. euc-kr
8. gbk

When CJK is promoted, the CJK group (items 5–8) moves to the front.

The first candidate for which Charset.canDecode returns true wins.

Fallback: windows-1252. This follows the WHATWG Encoding specification default — Windows-1252 is the most common legacy Western encoding and a superset of ISO-8859-1.

Why not Charset.detect()? The charset package ships a Charset.detect() method, but it is unsuitable: its defaultDetectOrder has nearly all encodings commented out in the source, and its BOM handling is buggy (UTF-16 BE BOM returns utf8; UTF-32 LE BOM is absent).

Traditional Chinese (Big5): Out of scope for this version. The charset 2.0.1 package ships no Big5 codec, and adding a separate dependency solely for Big5 is not warranted at this stage.

3 Sampling

Only the first 8 KB (8,192 bytes) of the input is examined. This avoids loading large files into memory and is sufficient for reliable BOM and structural detection.

The sample boundary is a hard byte cut — it is not aligned to a character boundary. If an 8 KB boundary falls mid-way through a multi-byte UTF-8 sequence, Stage 2 will reject an otherwise valid UTF-8 file and fall through to Stage 3. This is a documented, accepted trade-off: the edge case is vanishingly rare and the consequence (a windows-1252 result instead of utf-8) is mild.

4 Supported encodings and IANA label contract

detectCharset always returns a lowercase IANA label from the following closed set. The label is looked up from an explicit internal map — never from encoding.name — so the set is stable and independent of any upstream name changes in the charset package.

5 Accuracy

Stage 3 uses structural validity rather than statistical n-gram analysis. windows-1252 accepts nearly any byte sequence, so the probe is most reliable for CJK multi-byte encodings (which have strict structural constraints) and less discriminating between Western 8-bit encodings. In practice Stage 2 handles the vast majority of modern files, and the remaining legacy Western files are served adequately by the windows-1252 fallback.

Limitation: Charset.canDecode considers a decode invalid when the decoded string contains the Unicode replacement character U+FFFD. Input that legitimately contains U+FFFD will therefore be rejected by every non-UTF codec regardless of its actual encoding.

Ambiguity between short CJK samples: Short byte sequences can be structurally valid in more than one CJK encoding (e.g. a short EUC-KR sequence may also pass Shift-JIS validation). The probe order determines the winner in such cases. Longer samples improve discrimination.

6 Package dependency

dependencies:
  charset: ^2.0.1

charset is a pure-Dart package (Apache-2.0) with no Flutter or native dependencies.

7 Why not uchardet / ICU?

uchardet (Mozilla’s C++ port of the ICU character-set detection library) was evaluated and deliberately not adopted. The decision rests on three compounding factors.

7.1 Build complexity without proportionate benefit

uchardet is implemented in C++, not C. Unlike a straightforward native_toolchain_c / CBuilder integration, compiling it from source requires invoking a C++ compiler (clang++ / g++) in the build hook, plus either enumerating its ~40 source files explicitly or writing a thin extern "C" wrapper to bridge the C++ implementation to a C-compatible ABI. That is a meaningfully higher maintenance burden, particularly across the mobile target architectures (arm64-v8a, armeabi-v7a, x86_64).

7.2 The web platform requires a pure-Dart fallback regardless

dart:ffi is unavailable on web, so a conditional-export structure — native builds use FFI, web builds use pure Dart — would be mandatory no matter how capable the native path is. Because web input is overwhelmingly UTF-8 or BOM-marked, and because web is where detection failures matter least (browsers re-encode on render), the FFI path only improves outcomes on native platforms. For a personal-scale vault ingestion workload, that is a narrow benefit that does not justify the added complexity.

7.3 Accuracy uplift is modest for the actual workload

The three-stage pipeline — BOM inspection, UTF-8 structural validation, then Charset.canDecode() probing — correctly handles the vast majority of real files. uchardet’s statistical n-gram models offer genuine advantages when distinguishing similar Western 8-bit encodings (Latin-1 vs Windows-1252 vs ISO-8859-2 on ambiguous content), but those cases are rare in practice and the windows-1252 fallback is the correct answer for unresolvable Western content under the WHATWG Encoding specification anyway. For CJK content — where statistical detection would give the most meaningful uplift — the structural validity probes in Stage 3 already provide reliable discrimination because CJK multi-byte encodings impose tight structural constraints.

7.4 Revisability

This decision is explicitly revisable. If detection accuracy proves inadequate once real vault ingestion data is available, the FFI path remains viable. The conditional-export structure described above is already the correct shape to accommodate it.

8 Public API

/// Detects the character encoding of [bytes].
///
/// Returns a lowercase IANA encoding label (e.g. 'utf-8', 'shift-jis').
String detectCharset(Uint8List bytes);

Exported from package:betto_charset_detector/betto_charset_detector.dart.