problem parsing utf-8 encoded xml - minidom

[ashmir.d at gmail.com]

Hi,
I am trying to parse an xml file using the minidom parser.

<code>
from xml.dom import minidom
xmlfilename = "sample.xml"
xmldoc = minidom.parse(xmlfilename)
</code>

The parser is failing on this line:

<mrcb245-c>Heinrich Kèufner, Norbert Nedopil, Heinz Schèoch (Hrsg.).</
mrcb245-c>

This is the error message I get:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "readXML.py", line 11, in <module>
    xmldoc = minidom.parse(xmlfilename)
  File "C:\Python25\lib\xml\dom\minidom.py", line 1913, in parse
    return expatbuilder.parse(file)
  File "C:\Python25\lib\xml\dom\expatbuilder.py", line 924, in parse
    result = builder.parseFile(fp)
  File "C:\Python25\lib\xml\dom\expatbuilder.py", line 207, in
parseFile
    parser.Parse(buffer, 0)
xml.parsers.expat.ExpatError: not well-formed (invalid token): line
2254, column 21

It seems to me that it is having an issue with the 'è' character. I
have even tried the following to make sure it recognises the file as
utf-8 file:

<code>
from xml.dom import minidom
import codecs

xmlfilename = "sample.xml"
xmlfile = codecs.open(xmlfilename,"r","utf-8")
xmlstring = xmlfile.read()
xmldoc = minidom.parse(xmlfilename)
</code>

However, this doesn't work either and I get the following error
message:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "readXML.py", line 9, in <module>
    xmlstring = xmlfile.read()
  File "C:\Python25\lib\codecs.py", line 618, in read
    return self.reader.read(size)
  File "C:\Python25\lib\codecs.py", line 424, in read
    newchars, decodedbytes = self.decode(data, self.errors)
UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf8' codec can't decode bytes in position
69343-69345: invalid data

I'm assuming here that it is failing at the same place...

Can someone please point me in the right direction?
Thanks,
Ashmir