If you read in an XML file that specifies its encoding and then later on use xml.etree.ElementTree.write(), it is always written using US-ASCII. 

I think the behaviour should be different:
(1) If the XML that was read included an encoding, that encoding should be remembered and used when writing.
(2) If there is no encoding the default for writing should be UTF-8 (which is the standard for XML files).
(3) For non-XML files use US-ASCII.

Naturally, any of these could be overridden using an encoding argument to the write() method.

It behaves as documented. Moved to "feature request".
http://docs.python.org/library/xml.etree.elementtree.html

I think it makes sense to keep input and output separate. After all, the part of the software that outputs a document doesn't necessarily know how it came in, so having the default output encoding depend on the input sounds error prone. Encoding should always be explicit. My advice is to reject this feature request.

Perhaps a useful compromise would be to add an "encoding" attribute that is set to the encoding of the XML file that's read in (and with a default of "ascii").

That way it would be possible to preserve the encoding, e.g.:

import xml.etree.ElementTree as etree
xml_tree = etree.ElementTree(in_filehandle)
# process the tree
xml_tree.write(out_filehandle, encoding=xml_tree.encoding)

lxml.etree has encapsulated this in a 'docinfo' property which also holds the XML 'version', the 'standalone' state and the DOCTYPE (if available).

Note that this information is readily available in lxml.etree for any parsed Element (by wrapping it in a new ElementTree), but not in ET where it can only be associated to the ElementTree instance that did the parsing, not one that just wraps a parsed tree of Element objects. I would expect that this is still enough to handle this use case, though.

Stefan

I don't see how lxml is relevant here? lxml is a third party library, whereas etree is part of the standard library. And according to the 3.1.2 docs etree doesn't have a docinfo (or any other) property.

That's why I mention it here to prevent future incompatibilities between the two libraries.