Detect various blocks of characters for punctuation, symbols, emoticons
and whatnot. These are considered kind of neutral in the confidence
(because it's normal to have punctuation, and various text nowadays are
expected to display emoticones or various symbols).
What is of interest is all the rest, which will then consider as
out-of-range characters (likely characters for other scripts) and will
therefore drop the confidence.
Now confidence will therefore take into account the ratio of all
in-range characters (script letters + various neutral characters) and
the ratio of frequent letters within all letters (script letters +
out-of-range characters).
This improved algorithm makes for much more efficient detection, as it
bumped most confidence in all our unit test, and usually increased the
gap between the first and second contender.
In particular, I prepare the case for English detection. I am not
pushing actual English models yet, because it's not so efficient yet. I
will do when I will be able to handle better English confidence.
Until now, Korean charsets had its own probers as there are no
single-byte encoding for writing Korean. I now added a Korean model only
for the generic character and sequence statistics.
I also improved the generation script (script/BuildLangModel.py) to
allow for languages without single-byte charset generation and to
provide meaningful statistics even when the language script has a lot of
characters (so we can't have a full sequence combination array, just too
much data). It's not perfect yet. For instance our UTF-8 Korean test
file ends up with confidence of 0.38503, which is low for obvious Korean
text. Still it works (correctly detected, with top confidence compared
to others) and is a first step toward more improvement for detection
confidence.
This prober comes from MR !1 on the main branch though it was too
agressive then and could not get merged. On the improved API branch, it
doesn't detect other tests as Johab anymore.
Also fixing it to work with the new API.
Finally adding a Johab/ko unit test.
The Hebrew Model had never been regenerated by my scripts. I now added
the base generation files.
Note that I added 2 charsets: ISO-8859-8 and WINDOWS-1255 but they are
nearly identical. One of the difference is that the generic currency
sign is replaced by the sheqel sign (Israel currency) in Windows-1255.
And though this one lost the "double low line", apparently some Yiddish
characters were added. Basically it looks like most Hebrew text would
work fine with the same confidence on both charsets and detecting both
is likely irrelevant. So I keep the charset file for ISO-8859-8, but
won't actually use it.
The good part is now that Hebrew is also recognized in UTF-8 text thanks
to the new code and newly generated language model.
Taken from random pages for each of these languages.
I now have a test for every 26 supported couple of (UTF-8, language).
These are all working very fine and detected at the right encoding and
language.
Some probers are based on character distribution analysis. Though it is
still relevant detection logics, we also know that it is a lot less
subtle than sequence distribution.
Therefore let's give a good confidence for a text passing such analysis,
yet not a near perfect one, thus leaving some chance for other probers.
In particular, we can definitely consider that if some text gets over
0.7 on sequence distribution analysis, this is a very likely candidate.
I had the case with the Finnish UTF-8 test which was passing (UTF-8,
Finnish) detection with a staggering 0.86 confidence, yet was overrided
by UHC (EUC-KR). This used to not be a problem when nsMBCSGroupProber
would check the UTF-8 prober first and stop there with just some basic
encoding detection. Now that we go further and return all relevant
candidates, some simpler detection algorithm which always return
too-good confidence is not the best idea.
I had the case with the Czech test which was considered as Irish after
being shortcutted far too early after only 16 characters. Confidence
values was just barely above 0.5 for Irish (and barely below for Czech).
By adding a threshold (at least 256 characters), we give a bit of
relevant data to the engine to actually make an informed decision. By
then, the Czech detection was at more than 0.7, whereas the Irish one at
0.6.
nsEscCharsetProber will still only return a single candidate, because
this is detected by a state machine, not language statistics anyway.
Anyway now it will also return the language attached to the encoding.
Returning only the best one has limits, as it doesn't allow to check
very close confidence candidates. Now in particular, the UTF-8 prober
will return all ("UTF-8", lang) candidates for every language with
probable statistical fit.
No functional change yet because all probers still return 1 candidate.
Yet now we add a GetCandidates() method to return a number of
candidates.
GetCharSetName(), GetLanguage() and GetConfidence() now take a parameter
which is the candidate index (which must be below the return value of
GetCandidates()). We can now consider that nsCharSetProber computes a
couple (charset, language) and that the confidence is for this specific
couple, not just the confidence for charset detection.
Since our whole charset detection logics is based on text having meaning
(using actual language statistics), just because a text is valid UTF-8
does not mean it is absolutely the right encoding. It may also fit other
encoding with maybe very high statistical confidence (and therefore a
better candidate).
Therefore instead of just returning 0.99 or other high values, let's
weigh our encoding confidence with the best language confidence.
Computing a logical number of sequence was a big mistake. In particular,
a language with only positive sequence would have the same score as a
language with a mix of only positive and probable sequence (i.e. 1.0).
Instead, just use the real number of sequence, but probable of sequence
don't bring +1 to the numerator.
Also drop the mTypicalPositiveRatio, at least for now. In my tests, it
mostly made results worse. Maybe this would still make sense for
language with a huge number of characters (like CJK languages), for
which we won't have the full list of characters in our "frequent" list
of characters. Yet for most other languages, we actually list all the
possible sequences within the character set, therefore any sequence out
of our sequence list should necessarily drop confidence. Tweaking the
result backup up with some ratio is therefore counter-productive.
As for CJK cases, we'll see how to handle the much higher number of
sequences (too many to list them all) when we get there.
Now the UTF-8 prober would not only detect valid UTF-8, but would also
detect the most probable language. Using the data generated 2 commits
away, this works very well.
This is still basic and will require even more improvements. In
particular, now the nsUTF8Prober should return an array of ("UTF-8",
language) couple candidate. And nsMBCSGroupProber should itself forward
these candidates as well as other candidates from other multi-byte
detectors. This way, the public-facing API would get more probable
candidates, in case the algorithm is slightly wrong.
Also the UTF-8 confidence is currently stupidly high as soon as we
consider it to be right. We should likely weigh it with language
detection (in particular, if no language is detected, this should
severely weigh down UTF-8 detection; not to 0, but high enough to be a
fallback in case no other encoding+lang is valid and low enough to give
chances to other good candidate couples.
It detects languages similarly to the single byte encoding detector
algorithm, based on character frequency and sequence frequency, except
it does it generically from unicode codepoint, not caring at all about
the original encoding.
The confidence algorithm for language is very similar to the confidence
algorithm for encoding+language in nsSBCharSetProber, though I tweaked
it a little making it more trustworthy. And I plan to tweak it even a
bit more later, as I improve progressively the detection logics with
some of the idea I had.
Adding generic language model (see coming commit), which uses the same
data as specific single-byte encoding statistics model, except that it
applies it to unicode code points.
For this to work, instead of the CharToOrderMap which was mapping
directly from encoded byte (always 256 values) to order, now we add an
array of frequent characters, ordered by generic unicode code points to
the order of frequency (which can be used on the same sequence mapping
array).
This of course means that each prober where we will want to use these
generic models will have to implement their own byte to code point
decoder, as this is per-encoding logics anyway. This will come in a
subsequent commit.
Pretty basic, you can weight prefered language and this will impact the
result. Say the algorithm "hesitates" between encoding E1 in language L1
and encoding E2 in language L2. By setting L2 with a 1.1 weight, for
instance because this is the OS language, or usual prefered language,
you may help the algorithm to overcome very tight cases.
It can also be helpful when you already know for sure the language of a
document, you just don't know its encoding. Then you may set a very high
value for this language, or simply set a default value of 0, and set 1
for this language. Only relevant encoding will be taken into account.
This is still limited though as generic encoding are still implemented
language-agnostic. UTF-8 for instance would be disadvantaged by this
weight system until we make it language-aware.
This doesn't work for all probers yet, in particular not for the most
generic probers (such as UTF-8) or WINDOWS-1252. These will return NULL.
It's still a good first step.
Right now, it returns the 2-character language code from ISO 639-1. A
using project could easily get the English language name from the
XML/json files provided by the iso-codes project. This project will also
allow to easily localize the language name in other languages through
gettext (this is what we do in GIMP for instance). I don't add any
dependency though and leave it to downstream projects to implement this.
I was also wondering if we want to support region information for cases
when it would make sense. I especially wondered about it for Chinese
encodings as some of them seem quite specific to a region (according to
Wikipedia at least). For the time being though, these just return "zh".
We'll see later if it makes sense to be more accurate (maybe depending
on reports?).
Adding:
- uchardet_get_candidates()
- uchardet_get_encoding()
- uchardet_get_confidence()
Also deprecating uchardet_get_charset() to have developers look at the
new API instead. I was unsure if this should really get deprecated as it
makes the basic case simple, but the new API is just as easy anyway. You
can also directly call uchardet_get_encoding() with candidate 0 (same as
uchardet_get_charset(), it would then return "" when no candidate was
found).
Preparing for an updated API which will also allow to loop at the
confidence value, as well as get the list of possible candidate (i.e.
all detected encoding which had a confidence value high enough so that
we would even consider them).
It is still only internal logics though.
Replace the old link to the science paper by one on archive-mozilla
website. Remove the original source link as I can't find any archived
version of it (even on archive.org, only the folder structure is saved,
not actual files themselves, so it's useless).
Also add some history, which is probably a nice touch.
Add a link to crossroad to help people who'd want to cross-compile
uchardet.
Finally add the R binding by Artem Klevtsov and QtAV as reported.
- Fix string no output variables on UWP
On UWP, CMAKE_SYSTEM_PROCESSOR may be empty. As a result:
string(TOLOWER ${CMAKE_SYSTEM_PROCESSOR} TARGET_ARCHITECTURE)
will be treated as:
string(TOLOWER TARGET_ARCHITECTURE)
which, as a result, will cause a CMake error:
CMake Error at CMakeLists.txt:42 (string):
string no output variable specified
- Remove unnecessary header inclusions in uchardet.cpp
These extra inclusions cause build errors on Windows.
Not sure if it is in the C++ standard, or was, but apparently some
compilers may complain when files don't end with a newline (though
neither GCC nor Clang as our CI and my local builds are fine).
So here are all our generated source which didn't have such ending
newline (hopefully I forgot none). I just loaded them in my vim editor,
and resaved them. This was enough to add an ending newline.
uchardet_handle_data() should not try to process data of nul length.
Still this is not technically an error to feed empty data to the engine,
and I could imagine it could happen especially when done in some
automatic process with random input files (which looks like what was
happening in the reporter case). So feeding empty data just returns a
success without actually doing any processing, allowing to continue the
data feed.
My previous commit was good except for the very special case of wanting
to analyze a file named "--". This file would be ignored.
With this change, only the first "--" option will be ignored as meaning
"end of option arguments", but any remaining value (another "--"
included) will be considered as a file path.
