Hello,

The bug occurs when writing an XML file using the UTF-16 encoding.
The problem is that the etree encodes every string to utf-16 by itself - meaning, inserting the 0xfffe BOM before every string (tag, text, attribute name, etc.), causing a badly formed utf=16 strings.

A possible solution, which was offered by a co-worker of mine, was to use a utf-16 writer (from codecs.getwriter('utf-16') to write the file.

Best,

BugoK.