ElementTree and unicode

Question

I have this char in an xml file:

  
      fumè
  

I t

Answer 1

You do not need to decode XML for ElementTree to work. XML carries it's own encoding information (defaulting to UTF-8) and ElementTree does the work for you, outputting unicode:

>>> data = '''\
... 
...   
...       fumè
...   
... 
... '''
>>> x = ElementTree.fromstring(data)
>>> x[0][0].text
u'fum\xe8'

If your data is contained in a file(like) object, just pass the filename or file object directly to the ElementTree.parse() function:

x = ElementTree.parse('file.xml')