chardet gets it right, but may be confused by others<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;chardet.readthedocs.org&#x2F;en&#x2F;latest&#x2F;usage.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;chardet.readthedocs.org&#x2F;en&#x2F;latest&#x2F;usage.html</a><p>import chardet<p>print chardet.detect(&#x27;Bush hid the facts&#x27;)<p>&gt;&gt;&gt; {&#x27;confidence&#x27;: 1.0, &#x27;encoding&#x27;: &#x27;ascii&#x27;}<p>It might be fun to run Hypothesis on this to see what if any minimal ASCII set is guessed wrong by chardet.