[lxml-dev] problem about lxml encoding

[Stefan Behnel]

qhlonline wrote:
> Hi, all I have a question about lxml encoding and html encoding. What is
> the relationship between the encoding which lxml parser will be using
> and the encoding of an HTML file? if the HTML file encoding is not the
> same with it's <meta charset="some encoding">, What the choice of lxml's
> parser will be?

The HTML parser will use the encoding specified by the <meta> tag if it's
present, otherwise it will expect the document to be Latin-1. It will not
magically guess the right encoding if the <meta> tag happens to be
incorrect. If you somehow know the encoding better, you can override the
behaviour by passing the "encoding" option when instantiating the parser.

Does that help?

Stefan