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:

...

...

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.

...

...

dh = xml.debugDumpDocumentHead(xml)

DOCUMENT version=1.0 encoding=windows-1252 standalone=true

Regards,