XML with Unicode: what am I doing wrong?

[Kevin Dangoor]

This is a followup to a blog post I wrote the other day
http://www.blueskyonmars.com/archives/2005/01/31/using_unicode_with_elementtidy.html

I started out working in the context of elementtidy, but now I am 
running into trouble in general Python-XML areas, so I thought I'd toss 
the question out here. The code below is fairly self-explanatory. I have 
a small HTML snippet that is UTF-8 encoded and is not 7-bit ASCII 
compatible. I use Tidy to convert it to XHTML, and this particular setup 
returns a unicode instance rather than a string.

import _elementtidy as et
from xml.parsers import expat

data = unicode(open("snippetWithUnicode.html").read(), "utf-8")
html = et.fixup(data)[0]
parser = expat.ParserCreate()
parser.Parse(html)

UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character '\ub5' in 
position 542: ordinal not in range(128)

If I set my default encoding to utf8 in sitecustomize.py, it works just 
fine. I'm thinking that I can't be the only one trying to pass unicode 
to expat... Is there something else I need to do here?

Thanks,
Kevin
Blazing Things