Martin v. Löwis wrote:
It makes working with XML data a lot easier: you simply don't have to bother with the encoding of the XML data anymore and can just let the codec figure out the details. The XML parser can then work directly on the Unicode data.
Having the functionality indeed makes things easier. However, I don't find
s.decode(xml.detect_encoding(s))
particularly more difficult than
s.decode("xml-auto-detection")
Not really, but the codec has more control over what happens to the stream, ie. it's easier to implement look-ahead in the codec than to do the detection and then try to push the bytes back onto the stream (which may or may not be possible depending on the nature of the stream).
Whether it needs to be in C or not is another question (I would have done this in Python since performance is not really an issue), but since the code is already written, why not use it ?
It's a maintenance issue.
I'm sure Walter will do a great job in maintaining the code :-) Regards, -- Marc-Andre Lemburg eGenix.com Professional Python Services directly from the Source (#1, Nov 09 2007)
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