[lxml-dev] How do I get the encoding of an XML document from libxml2?

[Jean Jordaan]

Hi there

This request actually concerns *avoiding* depending on lxml, so
apologies for that :-]

I'd like to find the encoding of an XML document, as detected by
libxml2, using the Python bindings. From lxml, I can get it like this:

>>> et
<etree._ElementTree object at 0xb7cc992c>
>>> et.docinfo.encoding
'windows-1252'

According to the lxml API docs, lxml gets this information from libxml2 (see
http://codespeak.net/lxml/api.html#parsers )

How do I get at it without depending on lxml? The only way I've been
able to find is using debugDumpDocumentHead, which just prints to
stdout.

>>> dh = xml.debugDumpDocumentHead(xml)
DOCUMENT
version=1.0
encoding=windows-1252
standalone=true

Regards,
-- 
jean                                              . .. .... //\\\oo///\\