ok I did not have libmagic installed, I did brew install libmagic now it works 👍 , may be when install file-magic should have errored out saying the dependency libmagic is missing, thanks

file-magic dont seem to be as perfect chardet as for one of my csv file
output from filemagic: FileMagic(mime_type='text/plain', encoding='unknown-8bit', name='Non-ISO extended-ASCII text, with very long lines, with CRLF line terminators')

output from chardet : {'confidence': 0.8184309481349372, 'language': 'Greek', 'encoding': 'Windows-1253'}

chardet's output was very helpful while decoding the file.

@rjdp, for text files chardet could be better detecting the file type, but there are some cases in which chardet wrongly detects an encoding - for this reason I prefer to use file-magic. Note that currently only the command-line interface is using file-magic to automatically detect file types.
I'm going to reopen this issue because the documentation about this part is missing.

@cuducos, could you please check if information provided here solves your problem also?

@turicas do you have cases where chardet predicts wrongly but file-magic does predict correctly, this knowledge will be helpful for me, I just want you to know I am currently using cchardet which seems to be ~40x faster than chardet as it uses c extension.

oh I understand now, my program expects only text csv files so I am safe I guess, @turicas but as rows will also deal with text CSVs will it not be better to use cchardet instead of file ?

@rjdp, You can see on this video I made (it's in Portuguese but you can understand the code): https://youtu.be/BTMj5bDXByc?t=412 (look the code history also)
I still need to figure out the best options on detection (was thinking in creating a library to deal with it, which would use chardet/cchardet and file-magic, in the best cases for each one).

@turicas in case of text files, when will chardet/cchardet fail to predict correctly and file-magic predicts correctly?

@rjdp, I don't have this information in details for you. Look the example in the video, check the mime types supported by file and do your tests. ;)

@cuducos, could you please check if information provided here solves your problem also?

Yep, it did. I mean… I had to create a bare virtualenv (no site packages) in addition to brew install libmagic, but this fixed the issue.