require chardet

magic struggles to decode a number of encodings, particularly it
struggles with windows-1252, which Exchange *loves* to silently
re-encode mail in, without updated the charset of the payload. Chardet
successfully guesses these oddball encodings much more often.

1 files changed, 6 insertions, 24 deletions

diff --git a/alot/helper.py b/alot/helper.py
index ba41986e..612e5dba 100644
--- a/alot/helper.py
+++ b/alot/helper.py
@@ -25,6 +25,7 @@ from email.mime.image import MIMEImage
 from email.mime.text import MIMEText
 from email.mime.multipart import MIMEMultipart
 
+import chardet
 import urwid
 import magic
 from twisted.internet import reactor
@@ -386,34 +387,15 @@ def guess_mimetype(blob):
 
 
 def guess_encoding(blob):
-    """
-    uses file magic to determine the encoding of the given data blob.
+    """Use chardet to guess the encoding of a given data blob
 
-    :param blob: file content as read by file.read()
-    :type blob: data
+    :param blob: A blob of bytes
+    :type blob: bytes
     :returns: encoding
     :rtype: str
     """
-    # this is a bit of a hack to support different versions of python magic.
-    # Hopefully at some point this will no longer be necessary
-    #
-    # the version with open() is the bindings shipped with the file source from
-    # http://darwinsys.com/file/ - this is what is used by the python-magic
-    # package on Debian/Ubuntu.  However it is not available on pypi/via pip.
-    #
-    # the version with from_buffer() is available at
-    # https://github.com/ahupp/python-magic and directly installable via pip.
-    #
-    # for more detail see https://github.com/pazz/alot/pull/588
-    if hasattr(magic, 'open'):
-        m = magic.open(magic.MAGIC_MIME_ENCODING)
-        m.load()
-        return m.buffer(blob)
-    elif hasattr(magic, 'from_buffer'):
-        m = magic.Magic(mime_encoding=True)
-        return m.from_buffer(blob)
-    else:
-        raise Exception('Unknown magic API')
+    info = chardet.detect(blob)
+    return info['encoding']
 
 
 def try_decode(blob):