Vinayakc wrote: > Yes serge, I have removed the first character but it is still giving > encoding exception.
Then I guess this character was used as a poor man indentation tool at least in the beginning of your text. It's up to you to decide what to do with that character, you have several choices: * edit source xml file to get rid of it * remove it while you process your data * replace it with ordinary space * consider utf-8 Note, there are legitimate use cases for no-break space, for example one million can be written like 1 000 000, where spaces are non-breakable. This prevents the number to be broken by right margin like this: 1 000 000 Keep that in mind when you remove or replace no-break space. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list