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?).
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.
There is no "exception" in encoding. The non-breaking space 0xA0 is not
ASCII, and therefore returning "ASCII" will later create issues (for
instance trying to re-encode with iconv produces an error).
This was obviously an explicit decision in original code (according to
code comments), probably tied to specifity of the original program from
Mozilla. Now we want strict detection.
I will return "ISO-8859-1" for "nearly-ASCII texts with NBSP as only
exception" (note that I could have returned any ISO-8859 charsets since
they all have this character in common).