We are using prince in a python/zope environment.

Whenever someone types a character such as á into my database, my prince document fails to run. Strangely russian cryllic characters work no problem. But french and spanish symbols don't.

Any ideas?

thanks

What exactly do you mean by "fails to run"? Does Prince produce any error or warning messages? Are the documents well-formed XML, with a correctly specified encoding?

I get the following error message in prince:

xmlParseEntityref: no name

for strings with characters it doesn't understand such as & and á

If your document contains unescaped & characters then it is not XML, or HTML for that matter. Ampersands must always be escaped as &amp; and in most situations '<' and '>' must be escaped as &lt; and &gt; respectively. I suggest that you Google for "XML escaping" and "XML special characters" and then fix your XML processing.