xml-dev - Identifying the encoding of a document

[lisa@exinet.co.za (Lisa Retief)]

I am after the guidelines for identifying which encoding to use for a
particular document. I realise it depends on the characters included in the
document, but when you have megabytes of data that you yourself did not
code, this is kind of difficult to do. Are there tools that will do this for
you? Is there a fixed set of rules to follow so that I can build it inot my
application?

Any advice or pointers would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks, Lisa