[Tutor] Encoding and XML troubles

[William O'Higgins Witteman]

I've been struggling with encodings in my XML input to Python programs.

Here's the situation - my program has no declared encoding, so it
defaults to ASCII.  It's written in Unicode, but apparently that isn't
confusing to the parser.  Fine by me.  I import some XML, probably
encoded in the Windows character set (I don't remember what that's
called now).  I can read it for the most part - but it throws exceptions
when it hits accented characters (some data is being input by French
speakers).  I am using ElementTree for my XML parsing

What I'm trying to do is figure out what I need to do to get my program
to not barf when it hits an accented character.  I've tried adding an
encoding line as suggested here:

http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0263/

What these do is make the program fail to parse the XML at all.  Has
anyone encountered this?  Suggestions?  Thanks.
-- 

yours,

William