I have been working with this in order to generate an RSS feed using web2py.

I found, XMLGenerator method does not validate if is an unicode or string type, and it does not encode accord the encoding parameter of the XMLGenerator.

I added changed the method to verify if is an unicode object or try to convert to it using the desired encoding.

Recall that the _write UnbufferedTextIOWrapper receives an unicode object as parameter.

    def characters(self, content):
        if isinstance(content, unicode):      
            self._write(escape(content))
	else:
	    self._write(escape(unicode(content,self._encoding)))