For the dynastie project, I need to load data encoded in UTF-8 with Python minidom XML parser. But when I wrote node.toxml('utf-8') to display the XML tree, I get this error :

UnicodeDecodeError at /generate/1

'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xc2 in position 187: ordinal not in range(128)

In facts Python thinks that all data in XML tree are in ASCII and try to encode it into UTF-8 (or anything else you supplied). The solution is to use your own writer that will convert all non utf-8 strings in unicode string which can be then re-encoded in every format (like utf-8). This doesn't appears in Python 3 because, in Python 3, all strings are already in unicode. Add the following class to your code :

class UnicodeWriter(codecs.StreamWriter):
    encode = codecs.utf_8_encode

    def __init__(self):
        self.value = u''

    def write(self, object):
        if not type(object) == unicode:
            self.value = self.value + unicode(object, 'utf-8')
        else:
            self.value = self.value + object
        return self.value

    def reset(self):
	self.value = u''

    def getvalue(self):
	return self.value

And our node.toxml('utf-8') becomes :

writer = UnicodeWriter()
node.writexml(writer)
writer.getvalue().encode('utf-8')