Ok, one for the archives. MSVC only supports strings of up to 2048 bytes, so we had to find a way how to split these up. Steve wrote a little script that does that in etree.c. It makes lxml compile, but doesn't work well with distutils, so that's not really an option. I wrote a new script "update-error-constants.py" that fixes the problem at the root. Since we have to update the constants from time to time anyway to support new libxml2 versions, this script parses the HTML documentation page of libxml2 (it obviously uses lxml for that :) and generates the declarations in xmlerror.pxd and xmlerror.pxi. The strings it puts into the .pxi are split at about 2000 bytes, so that fixes the MSVC problem. To update the constants for a new version of libxml2, run the script as follows: cd /path/to/lxml python update-error-constants.py /path/to/libxml2-doc-dir it will then pick up the file "html/libxml2-xmlerror.html" from that directory and parse it. A "svn ci" will do the rest, but please remember running "make clean test" first! Stefan