On Thu, 2007-08-30 at 15:20 +0200, Pablo Rey wrote: > Hi Stefan, > > The xml has specified an encoding (<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" > ?>).
It's possible that the encoding specification is incorrect: >>> u = u"\N{LATIN SMALL LETTER E WITH ACUTE}" >>> print repr(u.encode("latin-1")) '\xe9' >>> print repr(u.encode("utf-8")) '\xc3\xa9' If your input string contains the byte 0xe9 where your accented e is, the file is actually latin-1 encoded. If it contains the byte sequence 0xc3,0xa9 it is UTF-8 encoded. If the string is encoded in latin-1, you can transcode it to utf-8 like this: contents = contents.decode("latin-1").encode("utf-8") HTH, -- Carsten Haese http://informixdb.sourceforge.net -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list