I have read the HOWTO on Unicode from the official docs and a full, very detailed article as well. Still I don't get it why it throws me this error. Here is what I attempt: I open an XML file that contains chars out of ASCII range (but inside allowed XML range). I do that with cfg = codecs.open(filename, encoding='utf-8, mode='r') which runs fine. Looking at the string with repr() also shows me a unicode string. Now I go ahead and read that with parseString(cfg.read().encode('utf-8'). Of course, my XML file starts with this: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>. Although I suppose it is not relevant, I also defined utf-8 for my python script, but since I am not writing unicode characters directly in it, this should not apply here. Same for the following line: from __future__ import unicode_literals which also is right at the beginning. Next thing I pass the generated Object to my own class where I read tags into variables like this: xmldata.getElementsByTagName(tagName)[0].firstChild.data and assign it to a variable in my class. Now what perfectly works are those commands (obj is an instance of the class): for element in obj: print element And this command does work as well: print obj.__repr__() I defined __iter__() to just yield every variable while __repr__() uses the typical printf stuff: "%s" % self.varname Both commands print perfectly and can output the unicode character. What does not work is this: print obj And now I am stuck because this throws the dreaded UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\xfc' in position 47: So what am I missing? What am I doing wrong? I am looking for a general solution, I always want to handle strings as unicode, just to avoid any possible errors and write a compatible program. Edit: I also defined this: def __str__(self): return self.__repr__() def __unicode__(self): return self.__repr__() From documentation I got that this