Mysterious xml.sax Encoding Exception

["Martin v. Löwis"]

> In both of these cases, there are only plain, 7-bit ascii characters
> in the xml, and it really is valid utf-16 as far as I can tell.

What do you mean by "7-bit ascii characters"? If it means what I think
it means (namely, a sequence of bytes whose values are between 1 and 
127), then it is *not* valid utf-16.

> Now here is the hard part: This never happens to me, and having gotten
> the actual xml content from one of the users and fed it to the parser,
> I don't get the exception.
> 
> What could be going on?  We are all on Python 2.5 (and all on an
> English locale).

What operating system do they use, and how do they send you the file
for verification? Can you have them run

print repr(open(filename, "rb").read(10))

and send you its output?

Regards,
Martin