XML / Unicode / SAX question

[IamIan]

I am using SAX to parse XML that has numeric html entities I need to
convert and feed to JavaScript as part of a CGI. I can get the
characters to print correctly, but not without being surrounded by
linebreaks:

from xml.sax import make_parser
from xml.sax.handler import ContentHandler
import htmlentitydefs, re

def unescape_charref(ref):
    name = ref[2:-1]
    base = 10
    if name.startswith("x"):
        name = name[1:]
        base = 16
    return unichr(int(name, base))

def replace_entities(match):
    ent = match.group()
    if ent[1] == "#":
        return unescape_charref(ent)

    repl = htmlentitydefs.name2codepoint.get(ent[1:-1])
    if repl is not None:
        repl = unichr(repl)
    else:
        repl = ent
    return repl

def unescape(data):
    return re.sub(r"&#?[A-Za-z0-9]+?;", replace_entities, data)

class newsHandler(ContentHandler):
  def __init__(self):
    self.isNews = 0

  def startElement(self, name, attrs):
    if name == 'title':
      self.isNews = 1

  def characters(self, ch):
    if self.isNews:
      ch = unescape(ch)
      print ch

  def endElement(self, name):
    if name == 'title':
      self.isNews = 0

parser = make_parser()
parser.setContentHandler(newsHandler())
parser.parse('http://www.some.com/rss/rss.xml')

For a line like 'Mark à Capbreton'
my results print as:
'Mark
à
Capbreton'

Is this another SAX quirk? I've already had to hack my way around SAX
not being able to split results on a colon. No matter if I try strip,
etc the results are always the same: newlines surrounding the html
entities. I'm using version 2.3.5 and need to stick to the standard
libraries. Thanks.