Re: [Python-Dev] XML codec?

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")

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. Regards, Martin