# chardet

7 Hacker News commenters recommended chardet and 21 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 1 of 13 months.

**Verdict:** Python library for detecting text encodings, praised for a faster AI-assisted rewrite under MIT. Critics say the relicensing was legally questionable and the rewrite was rushed and regression-prone.

## Why people recommend it

- Faster than the original (2 comments): "the chardet rewrite seems to be clearly superior to the original in performance too" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47258461)) "the AI result working from specs and tests was more performant than the original" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47270599))
- Clean-room rewrite under MIT (2 comments): "went way out of his way to produce a zero-reuse, ground-up reimplementation so that it could be MIT licensed" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47358131)) "he did the right thing to maximise the utility of the project" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47263919))
- Strong results overall (2 comments): "the AI result working from specs and tests was more performant than the original" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47270599)) "It seems like they did achieve great results with this one." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47396979))

## What people warn about

- Relicensing seen as legally irresponsible (6 comments): "considering the way in which the relicensing took place, the controversy, and the implications on software licences in general" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47270705)) "the current state is that they've done so and are ignoring people telling them they cannot" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47355645)) "morally you don't rewrite someone else's project with the same package name" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47263456))
- Clean-room claim disputed (3 comments): "The “same name” part to me feels somewhat disingenuous." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47260124)) "It clearly wasn’t a clean room reimplementation." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47266615)) "The README has clearly been touched by an LLM." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47259708))
- Regressions, unverified code, failed CI (5 comments): "Given the amount of changes I seriously doubt that this re-implementation has been reviewed properly" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47263668)) "tons of projects that depend on the "chardet" now drag in some crappy still unverified AI slop" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47259957)) "it was in reality a lot slower than the 6.0, and he's still digging through regression bugs" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47908575))
- Huge rewrite rushed without review (2 comments): "Given the amount of changes I seriously doubt that this re-implementation has been reviewed properly" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47263668)) "Half a million lines of code have been deleted and replaced over the course of four days" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47260612))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [ICU library](https://hackerapproved.com/p/icu.md): 5 recommend
- [Mojibake Unicode library](https://hackerapproved.com/p/mojibake.md): 5 recommend

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "chardet", https://hackerapproved.com/p/chardet/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).