Hi there This request actually concerns *avoiding* depending on lxml, so apologies for that :-] I'd like to find the encoding of an XML document, as detected by libxml2, using the Python bindings. From lxml, I can get it like this:

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et <etree._ElementTree object at 0xb7cc992c> et.docinfo.encoding 'windows-1252'

According to the lxml API docs, lxml gets this information from libxml2 (see http://codespeak.net/lxml/api.html#parsers ) How do I get at it without depending on lxml? The only way I've been able to find is using debugDumpDocumentHead, which just prints to stdout.

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dh = xml.debugDumpDocumentHead(xml) DOCUMENT version=1.0 encoding=windows-1252 standalone=true

Regards, -- jean . .. .... //\\\oo///\\