Hi, I just encountered failing lxml tests on a system with non-UTF-8 locale: (don't get irritated by the overall test case count, I've disabled some tests) ... 1626/1626 (100.0%): txt (xpathxslt) Doctest: xpathxslt.txt ====================================================================== ERROR: test_etree_parse_io_error (lxml.tests.test_io.ETreeIOTestCase) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Traceback (most recent call last): File "/apps/prod/releases/2.0/lib/python2.7/unittest/case.py", line 331, in run testMethod() File "/var/tmp/hjoukl/BUILD/NEW/64bit/gcc/2014-QX/lxml-3.4.1/src/lxml/tests/test_io.py", line 276, in test_etree_parse_io_error dn = tempfile.mkdtemp(prefix=dirnameRU) File "/apps/prod/releases/2.0/lib/python2.7/tempfile.py", line 329, in mkdtemp _os.mkdir(file, 0700) UnicodeEncodeError: 'latin-1' codec can't encode character u'\u0161' in position 6: ordinal not in range(256) ====================================================================== ERROR: test_etree_parse_io_error (lxml.tests.test_io.ElementTreeIOTestCase) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Traceback (most recent call last): File "/apps/prod/releases/2.0/lib/python2.7/unittest/case.py", line 331, in run testMethod() File "/var/tmp/hjoukl/BUILD/NEW/64bit/gcc/2014-QX/lxml-3.4.1/src/lxml/tests/test_io.py", line 276, in test_etree_parse_io_error dn = tempfile.mkdtemp(prefix=dirnameRU) File "/apps/prod/releases/2.0/lib/python2.7/tempfile.py", line 329, in mkdtemp _os.mkdir(file, 0700) UnicodeEncodeError: 'latin-1' codec can't encode character u'\u0161' in position 6: ordinal not in range(256) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Ran 1626 tests in 56.208s FAILED (errors=2) Skipping tests in lxml.cssselect - external cssselect package is not installed Comparing with ElementTree 1.3.0 TESTED VERSION: 3.4.1 Python: sys.version_info(major=2, minor=7, micro=5, releaselevel='final', serial=0) lxml.etree: (3, 4, 1, 0) libxml used: (2, 9, 1) libxml compiled: (2, 9, 1) libxslt used: (1, 1, 28) libxslt compiled: (1, 1, 28) make: *** [test_inplace] Error 1 This is caused by the directory path characters of a temp directory that are not representable in the system's encoding: def test_etree_parse_io_error(self): # this is a directory name that contains characters beyond latin-1 dirnameEN = _str('Directory') dirnameRU = _str('Ã~PÅ¡Ã~P°Ã~Qâ~@~ZÃ~P°Ã~P»Ã~PŸÃ~P³') filename = _str('nosuchfile.xml') dn = tempfile.mkdtemp(prefix=dirnameEN) try: self.assertRaises(IOError, self.etree.parse, os.path.join(dn, filename)) finally: os.rmdir(dn) dn = tempfile.mkdtemp(prefix=dirnameRU) try: self.assertRaises(IOError, self.etree.parse, os.path.join(dn, filename)) finally: os.rmdir(dn) I'm unsure of what a proper fix for this should look like. Refactor to 2 separate tests and disable the non-ascii dir path test based on sys.getfilesystemencoding ()? Or rather do dn = tempfile.mkdtemp(prefix=dirnameRU.encode('utf-8')) ? Holger Landesbank Baden-Wuerttemberg Anstalt des oeffentlichen Rechts Hauptsitze: Stuttgart, Karlsruhe, Mannheim, Mainz HRA 12704 Amtsgericht Stuttgart