Then how about the suggested "xml-auto-detect"?
That is better.
Then, I'd claim that the problem that the codec solves doesn't really exist. IOW, most XML parsers implement the auto-detection of encodings, anyway, and this is where architecturally this functionality belongs.
But not all XML parsers support all encodings. The XML codec makes it trivial to add this support to an existing parser.
I would like to question this claim. Can you give an example of a parser that doesn't support a specific encoding and where adding such a codec solves that problem? In particular, why would that parser know how to process Python Unicode strings?
Furthermore encoding-detection might be part of the responsibility of the XML parser, but this decoding phase is totally distinct from the parsing phase, so why not put the decoding into a common library?
I would not object to that - just to expose it as a codec. Adding it to the XML library is fine, IMO.
There's a (currently undocumented) codecs.detect_xml_encoding() in the patch. We could document this function and make it public. But if there's no codec that uses it, this function IMHO doesn't belong in the codecs module. Should this function be available from xml/__init__.py or should be put it into something like xml/utils.py?
Either - or.
Finally, I think the codec is incorrect. When saving XML to a file (e.g. in a text editor), there should rarely be encoding errors, since one could use character references in many cases.
This requires some intelligent fiddling with the errors attribute of the encoder.
Much more than that, I think - you cannot use a character reference in an XML Name. So the codec would have to parse the output stream to know whether or not a character reference could be used.
Correct, but as long as Python doesn't have an EBCDIC codec, that won't help much. Adding *detection* of EBCDIC to detect_xml_encoding() is rather simple though.
But it does! cp037 is EBCDIC, and supported by Python. Regards, Martin