escaping illegal characters in XML

["Martin v. Löwis"]

Sandy Norton wrote:
> doc.encoding = 'UTF-8'

Why do you think that setting an attribute named "encoding" should have 
any effect on the document?

> <?xml version="1.0" ?>
> <section>
> 	<item harvested="blah blah"/>
> </section>

Strictly speaking, this document *is* encoded in UTF-8: UTF-8 is the 
default if no encoding= attribute is given.

However, minidom normally won't support output in different encodings. 
In PyXML (and Python 2.3), the .tostring method of the document supports 
an optional encoding argument.

Regards,
Martin