I'm trying to build an xml document from scratch using xml.dom.minidom. Everything was going well until I tried to make a text node with a ® (Registered Trademark) symbol in. My objective is for when I finally hit print mydoc.toxml() this particular node will actually contain a ® symbol.

First I tried:

import xml.dom.minidom as mdom
data = '®'

which gives the rather obvious error of:

  File "C:\src\python\HTMLGen\test2.py", line 3
SyntaxError: Non-ASCII character '\xae' in file C:\src\python\HTMLGen\test2.py on line 3, but no encoding declared; see http://www.python.or
g/peps/pep-0263.html for details

I have of course also tried changing the encoding of my python script to 'utf-8' using the opening line comment method, but this didn't help.

So I thought

import xml.dom.minidom as mdom

data = '®'  #Both accepted xml encodings for registered trademark
data = '®'

text = mdom.Text()
text.data = data

print data
print text.toxml()

But because when I print text.toxml(), the ampersands are being escaped, I get this output:

®
®

My question is, does anybody know of a way that I can force the ampersands not to be escaped in the output, so that I can have my special character reference carry through to the XML document?

Basically, for this node, I want print text.toxml() to produce output of ® or ® in a happy and cooperative way!

EDIT 1:

By the way, if minidom actually doesn't have this capacity, I am perfectly happy using another module that you can recommend which does.

EDIT 2:

As Hugh suggested, I tried using data = u'®' (while also using data # -*- coding: utf-8 -*- Python source tags). This almost helped in the sense that it actually caused the ® symbol itself to be outputted to my xml. This is actually not the result I am looking for. As you may have guessed by now (and perhaps I should have specified earlier) this xml document happens to be an HTML page, which needs to work in a browser. So having ® in the document ends up causing rubbish in the browser (® to be precise!).

I also tried:

data = unichr(174)
text.data = data.encode('ascii','xmlcharrefreplace')
print text.toxml()

But of course this lead to the same origional problem where all that happens is the ampersand gets escaped by .toxml().

My ideal scenario would be some way of escaping the ampersand so that the XML printing function won't "escape" it on my behalf for the document (in other words, achieving my original goal of having ® or ® appear in the document).

Seems like soon I'm going to have to resort to regular expressions!

EDIT 2a:

Or perhaps not. Seems like getting my html meta information correct <META http-equiv="Content-Type" Content="text/html; charset=UTF-8"> could help, but I'm not sure yet how this fits in with the xml structure...