UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\xef' in position 0: ordinal not in range(128)

Question

I want to parse my XML document. So I have stored my XML document as below

class XMLdocs(db.Expando):  
   id = db.IntegerProperty()    
   name=db.StringPro         


        

Answer 1

It seems you are hitting a UTF-8 byte order mark (BOM). Try using this unicode string with BOM extracted out:

import codecs

content = unicode(q.content.strip(codecs.BOM_UTF8), 'utf-8')
parser.parse(StringIO.StringIO(content))

I used strip instead of lstrip because in your case you had multiple occurences of BOM, possibly due to concatenated file contents.