hi, Just in case my question about replacing characters with entities got lost over the weekend, I'm resending. I'm no expert in this area and want to make sure I'm not doing anything stupid of dangerous. Any help, ideas, comments appreciated. thanks, --Tim Arnold I have to follow a specification for producing xhtml files. The original files are in cp1252 encoding and I must reencode them to utf-8. Also, I have to replace certain characters with html entities. I think I've got this right, but I'd like to hear if there's something I'm doing that is dangerous or wrong. Please see the appended code, and thanks for any comments. I have two functions, translate (replaces high characters with entities) and reencode (um, reencodes): --------------------------------- import codecs, StringIO from lxml import etree high_chars = { 0x2014:'—', # 'EM DASH', 0x2013:'–', # 'EN DASH', 0x0160:'Š',# 'LATIN CAPITAL LETTER S WITH CARON', 0x201d:'”', # 'RIGHT DOUBLE QUOTATION MARK', 0x201c:'“', # 'LEFT DOUBLE QUOTATION MARK', 0x2019:"’", # 'RIGHT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK', 0x2018:"‘", # 'LEFT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK', 0x2122:'™', # 'TRADE MARK SIGN', 0x00A9:'©', # 'COPYRIGHT SYMBOL', } def translate(string): s = '' for c in string: if ord(c) in high_chars: c = high_chars.get(ord(c)) s += c return s def reencode(filename, in_encoding='cp1252',out_encoding='utf-8'): with codecs.open(filename,encoding=in_encoding) as f: s = f.read() sio = StringIO.StringIO(translate(s)) parser = etree.HTMLParser(encoding=in_encoding) tree = etree.parse(sio, parser) result = etree.tostring(tree.getroot(), method='html', pretty_print=True, encoding=out_encoding) with open(filename,'wb') as f: f.write(result) if __name__ == '__main__': fname = 'mytest.htm' reencode(fname)