Minidom can parse ASCII-encoded XML data, but can't create it.

>>> from xml.dom.minidom import parseString
>>> doc = parseString(b'<?xml version="1.0" encoding="us-ascii"?><foo>&#x20ac;</foo>')
>>> doc.toxml('us-ascii')
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
  File "/home/serhiy/py/cpython/Lib/xml/dom/minidom.py", line 47, in toxml
    return self.toprettyxml("", "", encoding)
  File "/home/serhiy/py/cpython/Lib/xml/dom/minidom.py", line 56, in toprettyxml
    self.writexml(writer, "", indent, newl, encoding)
  File "/home/serhiy/py/cpython/Lib/xml/dom/minidom.py", line 1798, in writexml
    node.writexml(writer, indent, addindent, newl)
  File "/home/serhiy/py/cpython/Lib/xml/dom/minidom.py", line 868, in writexml
    self.childNodes[0].writexml(writer, '', '', '')
  File "/home/serhiy/py/cpython/Lib/xml/dom/minidom.py", line 1090, in writexml
    _write_data(writer, "%s%s%s" % (indent, self.data, newl))
  File "/home/serhiy/py/cpython/Lib/xml/dom/minidom.py", line 304, in _write_data
    writer.write(data)
  File "/home/serhiy/py/cpython/Lib/codecs.py", line 355, in write
    data, consumed = self.encode(object, self.errors)
UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character '\u20ac' in position 0: ordinal not in range(128)

Same for other non-unicode encodings.

Suggested simple patch solves this issue.

Serhiy - why did you remove that documentation bit?

> Serhiy - why did you remove that documentation bit?

Because it's not relevant anymore. With patch you will never get
UnicodeError exceptions in case of unrepresentable text data.

New changeset 7b97cea795d8 by Eli Bendersky in branch 'default':
Issue #15296: Fix minidom.toxml/toprettyxml for non-unicode encodings.  Patch by Serhiy Storchaka, with some minor style adjustments by me.
http://hg.python.org/cpython/rev/7b97cea795d8

Fixed in 3.3

Thanks for the patch