title: ElementTree and unicode
body: <p>I have this char in an xml file:</p>
  
  <pre><code>&lt;data&gt;
    &lt;products&gt;
        &lt;color&gt;fumè&lt;/color&gt;
    &lt;/product&gt;
  &lt;/data&gt;
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>I try to generate an instance of ElementTree with the following code:</p>
  
  <pre><code>string_data = open('file.xml')
  x = ElementTree.fromstring(unicode(string_data.encode('utf-8')))
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>and I get the following error:</p>
  
  <pre><code>UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\xe8' in position 185: ordinal not in range(128)
  </code></pre>
  
  <p><em>(NOTE: The position is not exact, I sampled the xml from a larger one).</em></p>
  
  <p>How to solve it? Thanks</p>