Question: I have this char in an xml file:

```
<data>
  <products>
      <color>fumè</color>
  </product>
</data>

```

I try to generate an instance of ElementTree with the following code:

```
string_data = open('file.xml')
x = ElementTree.fromstring(unicode(string_data.encode('utf-8')))

```

and I get the following error:

```
UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\xe8' in position 185: ordinal not in range(128)

```

*(NOTE: The position is not exact, I sampled the xml from a larger one).*

How to solve it? Thanks

Answer: 
Might you have stumbled upon this problem while using [Requests (HTTP for Humans)](http://docs.python-requests.org/en/latest/index.html), `response.text` decodes the response by default, you can use `response.content` to get the undecoded data, so ElementTree can decode it itself. Just remember to use the correct encoding.

More info: <http://docs.python-requests.org/en/latest/user/quickstart/#response-content>
The most likely your file is not UTF-8. `è` character can be from some other encoding, `latin-1` for example.