How to parse unicode strings with minidom?
Minidom doesn't directly support parsing Unicode strings; it's something that has historically had poor support and standardisation. Many XML tools recognise only byte streams as something an XML parser can consume.
If you have plain files, you should either read them in as byte strings (not Unicode!) and pass that to parseString(), or just use parse() which will read a file directly.
I'm trying to parse a bunch of xml files with the library xml.dom.minidom, to extract some data and put it in a text file. Most of the XMLs go well, but for some of them I get the following error when calling minidom.parsestring():

UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\u2019' in position 5189: ordinal not in range(128)

It happens for some other non-ascii characters too. My question is: what are my options here? Am I supposed to somehow strip/replace all those non-English characters before being able to parse the XML files?