My First Digg API Application

Here is my very first Python program that I've ever wrote outside of a classroom. Basically, it display informations of all Digg friends.

One thing I need to figure out is how to handle non-ASCII characters. My code throws exception when it encounter Unicode or non-printable characters in full name.

import urllib
import xml.etree.ElementTree as ET

# You need to changes following lines 
uname = 'myusername'
appkey = urllib.quote('http://my.web.site/')

# ---------------------------------------------------------

count = 100
offset = 0
class AppURLopener(urllib.FancyURLopener):
  version = "My-Application/1.0"
urllib._urlopener = AppURLopener()
optstr = "&count=" + str(count) + "&offset=" + str(offset)
diggurl = 'http://services.digg.com/user/' + uname + \
            '/friends' + '?appkey=' + appkey + optstr;
diggxml = urllib.urlopen(diggurl).read()
et = ET.fromstring(diggxml)
nfriend = int(et.attrib["total"])

while True:

  for e in et:
    name = e.get("name", "")
    icon = e.get("icon", "")
    registered = e.get("registered", "")
    profileviews = e.get("profileviews", "")
    # Some of names contains non-ASCII character which
    # I still having figure out how to handle it
    # fullname = e.get("fullname", "")
    fullname = ""
    mutual = e.get("mutual", "")
    date = e.get("date", "")  
    print name + "|" + icon + "|" + registered + "|" + \
            profileviews + "|" + fullname + "|" +      \
            mutual + "|" + date
 
  offset += count
  if offset >= nfriend:
    break
  optstr = "&count=" + str(count) + "&offset=" + \
            str(offset)
  diggurl = 'http://services.digg.com/user/' + uname +   \
            '/friends' + '?appkey=' + appkey + optstr;
  diggxml = urllib.urlopen(diggurl).read()
  et = ET.fromstring(diggxml)