The changelog for lxml 2.1beta3 states that "Non-ASCII characters in attribute values are no longer escaped on serialisation." I am using a product that is also making use of the C libraries libxml2 and libxslt. The XML being produced has all the Non-ASCII characters in attribute values escaped even though they were initially valid UTF-8 encoded characters. The vendor has informed me that there is nothing they can do about this as the escaping is being done in the libxslt C library. Can someone on the lxml development team describe to me how lxml was able to resolve this issue? Was this done by post processing strings produced by libxslt or is there some way to get libxslt not to escape Non-ASCII characters in attribute values? Thanks, John Butler