diff --git a/README.md b/README.md
index 47923d2..6568665 100644
--- a/README.md
+++ b/README.md
@@ -36,6 +36,7 @@ Configuration options can be provided either by using the command line arguments
 - `disable_autoopen` (`-a`, `--disable-autoopen`):  if `true`, the detector will not automatically open a browser window to display the report.
 - `truncate` (`-T`, `--truncate`):  if `true`, highlighted code will be truncated to remove non-highlighted regions from the displayed output (sections not within 10 lines of highlighted code will be replaced with "...").
 - `out_file` (`-O`, `--out-file`): path to save output report to. A '.html' extension will be added to the path if not provided. If a directory is provided instead of a file, the report will be saved to that directory as report.html.
+- `encoding` (`--encoding`): encoding to use for reading files (the default is UTF-8). If files use varying encodings, --encoding DETECT can be used to detect the encoding of all files *(note: encoding detection requires the chardet package)*.
 
 ## API
 Copydetect can also be run via the python API. An example of basic usage is provided below. API documentation is available [here](https://copydetect.readthedocs.io/en/latest/api.html).
diff --git a/copydetect/__init__.py b/copydetect/__init__.py
index 656c379..53b8df3 100644
--- a/copydetect/__init__.py
+++ b/copydetect/__init__.py
@@ -1,3 +1,3 @@
-__version__ = "0.4.5"
+__version__ = "0.4.6"
 
 from .detector import CopyDetector, CodeFingerprint, compare_files