gistfile1.txt

class Element(etree.ElementBase):
    def __init__(self, tag, *args, **kwargs):

    ... blah-blah ...
        
    def __setitem__(self, idx, val):
        try:
            self.set(idx, fix_unicode(val))
        except:
            print repr(val)

    ... blah-blah ...

def fix_unicode(s):
    s = unicode(unicode(str(s)).encode('utf8', 'xmlcharrefreplace'))
    return s