--- a/hgext/convert/darcs.py	Sat Sep 11 00:39:34 2010 +0200
+++ b/hgext/convert/darcs.py	Fri Sep 10 09:30:50 2010 -0500
@@ -83,6 +83,8 @@
         shutil.rmtree(self.tmppath, ignore_errors=True)
 
     def xml(self, cmd, **kwargs):
+        # NOTE: darcs is currently encoding agnostic and will print
+        # patch metadata byte-for-byte, even in the XML changelog.
         etree = ElementTree()
         fp = self._run(cmd, **kwargs)
         etree.parse(fp)
@@ -107,8 +109,12 @@
         elt = self.changes[rev]
         date = util.strdate(elt.get('local_date'), '%a %b %d %H:%M:%S %Z %Y')
         desc = elt.findtext('name') + '\n' + elt.findtext('comment', '')
-        return commit(author=elt.get('author'), date=util.datestr(date),
-                      desc=desc.strip(), parents=self.parents[rev])
+        # etree can return unicode objects for name, comment, and author,
+        # so recode() is used to ensure str objects are emitted.
+        return commit(author=self.recode(elt.get('author')),
+                      date=util.datestr(date),
+                      desc=self.recode(desc).strip(),
+                      parents=self.parents[rev])
 
     def pull(self, rev):
         output, status = self.run('pull', self.path, all=True,