Detect (or best guess of) incoming string encoding in Java

I was wondering if there are known methods to 开发者_高级运维detect (or give a best guess of) the encoding of a particular string in Java.

I know that you always need some additional meta-data to tell what the encoding is, and there are best practices etc., but the situation I'm in, I need to give the best approximation.

A solution -- or a pointer -- to programatically distinguishing between UTF-8 and UTF-16 is also welcome.

The utf-8 encoding should be easy to verify:

UTF-8 strings can be fairly reliably recognized as such by a simple heuristic algorithm. from wikipedia

Take a look at this site to see the algorithm

Look at ICU4J which includes a character detector

Take a look at Apache Commons IO, in particular BOMInputStream.