1. A computer implemented method for extracting meaningful text from a document of unknown or unspecified format, comprising: reading the document to extract raw encoded text; analyzing the raw encoded text to identify one or more text chunks; and for a text chunk of the one or more text chunks: performing a compression identification analysis to determine whether compression is likely and, if compression is likely, performing a decompression process; performing an encoding identification process to identify a likely character encoding protocol; and converting the text chunk using the identified likely character encoding protocol to output the text chunk as readable text, wherein the encoding identification process includes, for each protocol of a plurality of encoding protocols, using a common word selection of words in each protocol to identify matches.