Why bother with auto-detection if it’s slow, inaccurate, and non-standard?
Sometimes you receive text with verifiably inaccurate encoding information. Or text without any encoding information, and the specified default encoding doesn’t work. There are also some poorly designed standards that have no way to specify encoding at all. If following the relevant standards gets you nowhere, and you decide that processing the text is more important than maintaining interoperability, then you can try to auto-detect the character encoding as a last resort. An example is my Universal Feed Parser, which calls this auto-detection library only after exhausting all other options.
