You are mixing: 1. A unicode string 2. A plain 8-bit string with characters outside the ascii range.
Its not clear from the code fragment which strings are the unicode ones, and which are not. I suggest you work all in unicode.... You need to convert those 8 bit strings into unicode strings by applying a character encoding using code like...
myunicodestring = unicode(my8bitstring,'utf-8')
....substitute 'utf-8' for whatever character encoding you are using.
returnedhtml="" storypooge=context.xmlheadparse('/var/www/ap/'+urlfeed) for x in range(len(storypooge)): returnedhtml=returnedhtml+'• <a href="/News/apmethods/apstory?urlfeed=' url=context.nntpnamestripper(storypooge[x][1]) # this is a string headline=storypooge[x][0] # This is unicode returnedhtml=unicode(url, "ascii") return returnedhtml When I do this (with any encoding) I get "decoding unicode is not supported" error