plsfix

plsfix

plsfix is drop-in replacement for ftfy, written in Rust and ~10x faster.

>>> from plsfix import fix_text
>>> print(fix_text("(ง'⌣')ง"))
(ง'⌣')ง

Installing

Python

pip install plsfix

Rust

cargo add plsfix

What it does

(Taken from the ftfy README)

Here are some examples (found in the real world) of what plsfix can do:

plsfix can fix mojibake (encoding mix-ups), by detecting patterns of characters that were clearly meant to be UTF-8 but were decoded as something else:

    >>> import plsfix
    >>> plsfix.fix_text('✔ No problems')
    '✔ No problems'

Does this sound impossible? It's really not. UTF-8 is a well-designed encoding that makes it obvious when it's being misused, and a string of mojibake usually contains all the information we need to recover the original string.

plsfix can fix multiple layers of mojibake simultaneously:

    >>> plsfix.fix_text('The Mona Lisa doesn’t have eyebrows.')
    "The Mona Lisa doesn't have eyebrows."

It can fix mojibake that has had "curly quotes" applied on top of it, which cannot be consistently decoded until the quotes are uncurled:

    >>> plsfix.fix_text("l’humanité")
    "l'humanité"

plsfix can fix mojibake that would have included the character U+A0 (non-breaking space), but the U+A0 was turned into an ASCII space and then combined with another following space:

    >>> plsfix.fix_text('Ã\xa0 perturber la réflexion')
    'à perturber la réflexion'
    >>> plsfix.fix_text('à perturber la réflexion')
    'à perturber la réflexion'

plsfix can also decode HTML entities that appear outside of HTML, even in cases where the entity has been incorrectly capitalized:

    >>> # by the HTML 5 standard, only 'PÉREZ' is acceptable
    >>> plsfix.fix_text('PÉREZ')
    'PÉREZ'

These fixes are not applied in all cases, because plsfix has a strongly-held goal of avoiding false positives -- it should never change correctly-decoded text to something else.

The following text could be encoded in Windows-1252 and decoded in UTF-8, and it would decode as 'MARQUɅ'. However, the original text is already sensible, so it is unchanged.

    >>> plsfix.fix_text('IL Y MARQUÉ…')
    'IL Y MARQUÉ…'