[reportlab-users] LGPL dependency - chardet

[Robin Becker]

Hi Josiah,

I've just released reportlab 4.4.2 which now requires charset-normalizer
instead of chardet.

On Mon, 16 Jun 2025 at 11:45, Josiah Kane <josiah.kane at refeyn.com> wrote:

> Hello,
>
> The current version of reportlab has a mandatory dependency on a library
> called "chardet" for guessing character encodings.
> Chardet is released under the LGPL. This is a more restrictive license
> than the BSD license used by reportlab. It effectively prohibits using
> reportlab to those unable to comply with the lgpl.
>
> There is another popular library for addressing the character encodings
> called charset_normalizer (https://pypi.org/project/charset-normalizer/),
> which is released under a more permissive MIT license. It offers a
> compatibility interface with chardet, such that the only code changes
> required should be switching the module name. According to the author's
> tests, charset_normalizer also runs faster and supports more encodings. As
> a proxy for general popularity, according to
> https://piptrends.com/compare/charset-normalizer-vs-chardet,
> charset_normalizer is  downloaded approximately ten times more frequently
> than chardet.
>
> Would there be any openness to swapping out the dependency?
>
> Thanks
> Josiah Kane
> Josiah Kane
> Principal Algorithm Engineer
> josiah.kane at refeyn.com
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-- 
Robin Becker
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