Issue #12451: The XInclude default loader of xml.etree now decodes files from

Victor Stinner · Victor Stinner · commit eaf399e3355e · 2011-06-30T18:10:14.000+02:00
UTF-8 instead of the locale encoding if the encoding is not specified. It now
also opens XML files for the parser in binary mode instead of the text mode to
avoid encoding issues.
diff --git a/Lib/xml/etree/ElementInclude.py b/Lib/xml/etree/ElementInclude.py
@@ -67,21 +67,22 @@ class FatalIncludeError(SyntaxError):
 #
 # @param href Resource reference.
 # @param parse Parse mode.  Either "xml" or "text".
-# @param encoding Optional text encoding.
+# @param encoding Optional text encoding (UTF-8 by default for "text").
 # @return The expanded resource.  If the parse mode is "xml", this
 #    is an ElementTree instance.  If the parse mode is "text", this
 #    is a Unicode string.  If the loader fails, it can return None
 #    or raise an IOError exception.
 # @throws IOError If the loader fails to load the resource.
 
 def default_loader(href, parse, encoding=None):
-    file = open(href)
     if parse == "xml":
+        file = open(href, 'rb')
         data = ElementTree.parse(file).getroot()
     else:
+        if not encoding:
+            encoding = 'UTF-8'
+        file = open(href, 'r', encoding=encoding)
         data = file.read()
-        if encoding:
-            data = data.decode(encoding)
     file.close()
     return data
 
diff --git a/Misc/NEWS b/Misc/NEWS
@@ -25,6 +25,11 @@ Core and Builtins
 Library
 -------
 
+- Issue #12451: The XInclude default loader of xml.etree now decodes files from
+  UTF-8 instead of the locale encoding if the encoding is not specified. It now
+  also opens XML files for the parser in binary mode instead of the text mode
+  to avoid encoding issues.
+
 - Issue #12451: doctest.debug_script() doesn't create a temporary file
   anymore to avoid encoding issues.
 
