wddx problem with entities

[Tim Arnold]

I'm confused about why I get this error:
UnicodeError: ASCII encoding error: ordinal not in range(128)

when I try to load a wddx file containing this string:
<string>The image file, gif/aperçu.png, does
                  not exist.</string>

When I loop through the file as if it's text and check the ord() value of 
each character, of course it's clean. Do I have to replace numbered entities 
in the wddx file before I can wddx.load() it?
thanks!
--tim

example program:
-------------------
from xml.marshal import wddx

datastring = '''<?xml version="1.0"?>
<!DOCTYPE wddxPacket SYSTEM "wddx_0090.dtd">
<wddxPacket version="0.9">
<header/>
<data><struct>
  <string>The image file, gif/aperçu.png,does not exist.</string>
</struct></data></wddxPacket>'''

data = wddx.loads(datastring)