title: which encoding does the python lxml module use internally?
body: <p>When I get a webpage, I use UnicodeDammit to convert it to utf-8 encoding, just like: </p>
  
  <pre><code>import chardet
  from lxml import html
  content = urllib2.urlopen(url).read()
  encoding = chardet.detect(content)['encoding']
  if encoding != 'utf-8':
      content = content.decode(encoding, 'replace').encode('utf-8')
  doc = html.fromstring(content, base_url=url)
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>but when I use:</p>
  
  <pre><code>text = doc.text_content()
  print type(text)
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>The output is <code>&lt;type 'lxml.etree._ElementUnicodeResult'&gt;</code>.
  why? I thought it would be a utf-8 string.</p>