hi, This is a bug reported last August for Mac, but it is also happening for freebsd8.2 (amd64). https://bugs.launchpad.net/lxml/+bug/707396 Python 2.7.1 (r271:86832, Apr 5 2011, 13:19:14) [GCC 4.2.1 20070719 [FreeBSD]] on freebsd8 from lxml import etree parser = etree.HTMLParser(encoding='cp1252') Traceback (most recent call last): File "lxml_bug.py", line 11, in <module> parser = etree.HTMLParser(encoding='cp1252') File "parser.pxi", line 1423, in lxml.etree.HTMLParser.__init__ (src/lxml/lxml.etree.c:81303) File "parser.pxi", line 743, in lxml.etree._BaseParser.__init__ (src/lxml/lxml.etree.c:76172) LookupError: unknown encoding: 'cp1252' Here are my details: Python : sys.version_info(major=2, minor=7, micro=1, releaselevel='final', serial=0) lxml.etree : (2, 3, 1, 0) libxml used : (2, 7, 8) libxml compiled : (2, 7, 8) libxslt used : (1, 1, 26) libxslt compiled : (1, 1, 26) platform.architecture() ('64bit', 'ELF') thanks, --Tim Arnold