UnicodeDecodeError in Python 2.7

I am trying to read a utf-8 encoded xml file in python and I am doing some processing on the lines read from the file something like below: ``` next_sent_separator_index = doc_content.find(word_value, int(characterOffsetEnd_value) + 1) ``` Where doc_content is the line read from the file and word_value is one of the string from the the same line. I am getting encoding related error for above line whenever doc_content or word_value is having some Unicode characters. So, I tried to decode them first with utf-8 decoding (instead of default ascii encoding) as below : ``` next_sent_separator_index = doc_content.decode('utf-8').find(word_value.decode('utf-8'), int(characterOffsetEnd_value) + 1) ``` But I am still getting UnicodeDecodeError as below : ``` Traceback (most recent call last): File "snippetRetriver.py", line 402, in <module> sentences_list,lemmatised_sentences_list = getSentenceList(form_doc) File "snippetRetriver.py", line 201, in getSentenceList next_sent_separator_index = doc_content.decode('utf-8').find(word_value.decode('utf-8'), int(characterOffsetEnd_value) + 1) File "/usr/lib/python2.7/encodings/utf_8.py", line 16, in decode return codecs.utf_8_decode(input, errors, True) UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\xe9' in position 8: ordinal not in range(128) ``` Can anyone suggest me a suitable approach / way to avoid these kind of encoding errors in python 2.7 ?