lxml.etree.XML ValueError for Unicode string
Question: I'm transforming [an
xml](https://gist.github.com/guinslym/5ce47460a31fe4c4046b#file-original_xml-
xml) document with
[xslt](https://gist.github.com/guinslym/5ce47460a31fe4c4046b#file-test_xslt-
xslt). While doing it with python3 I had this following error. But I don't
have any errors with python2

    
    
    -> % python3 cstm/artefact.py
    Traceback (most recent call last):
      File "cstm/artefact.py", line 98, in <module>
        simplify_this_dataset('fisheries-service-des-peches.xml')
      File "cstm/artefact.py", line 85, in simplify_this_dataset
        xslt_root = etree.XML(xslt_content)
      File "lxml.etree.pyx", line 3012, in lxml.etree.XML (src/lxml/lxml.etree.c:67861)
      File "parser.pxi", line 1780, in lxml.etree._parseMemoryDocument (src/lxml/lxml.etree.c:102420)
    ValueError: Unicode strings with encoding declaration are not supported. Please use bytes input or XML fragments without declaration.
    
    #!/usr/bin/env python3
    # vim:fileencoding=UTF-8:ts=4:sw=4:sta:et:sts=4:ai
    # -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
    
    from lxml import etree
    
    def simplify_this_dataset(dataset):
        """Create A simplify version of an xml file
        it will remove all the attributes and assign them as Elements instead
        """
        module_path = os.path.dirname(os.path.abspath(__file__))
        data = open(module_path+'/data/ex-fire.xslt')
        xslt_content = data.read()
        xslt_root = etree.XML(xslt_content)
        dom = etree.parse(module_path+'/../CanSTM_dataset/'+dataset)
        transform = etree.XSLT(xslt_root)
        result = transform(dom)
        f = open(module_path+ '/../CanSTM_dataset/otra.xml', 'w')
        f.write(str(result))
        f.close()
    


Answer: You can also decode the UTF-8 string and encode it with ascii before passing
it to etree.XML

    
    
     xslt_content = data.read()
     xslt_content = xslt_content.decode('utf-8').encode('ascii')
     xslt_root = etree.XML(xslt_content)
    

