You might find the WebHelpers html_quote function useful: http://pylonshq.com/project/pylonshq/browser/WebHelpers/trunk/webhelpers/util.py Specifically asciification: if not isinstance(s, basestring): if hasattr(s, '__unicode__'): s = unicode(s) else: s = str(s) s = cgi.escape(s, True) if isinstance(s, unicode): s = s.encode('ascii', 'xmlcharrefreplace') -- Ian Bicking / ianb@colorstudy.com / http://blog.ianbicking.org