python - French and lxml text

Question

I'm trying to assign a valid French text string to a text string using lxml:

el = etree.Element("someelement")
el.text = 'Disponible ?? partir du 1er Octobre'

I get the error:

ValueError: All strings must be XML compatible: Unicode or ASCII, no NULL bytes or control characters

I've also tried:

el.ext = etree.CDATA('Disponible ?? partir du 1er Octobre')

However I get the same error.

How do I handle French in XML, in particular, ISO-8859-1? There are ways to specify encoding within the tostring() function in lxml, but not for assigning text values within elements.

Answer 1

If you have version of python < 3 you can try: el.text = u'Disponible ? partir du 1er Octobre'