title: French and lxml text
body: <p>I'm trying to assign a valid French text string to a text string using lxml:</p>
  
  <pre><code>el = etree.Element("someelement")
  el.text = 'Disponible Ã  partir du 1er Octobre'
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>I get the error:</p>
  
  <blockquote>
    <p>ValueError: All strings must be XML compatible: Unicode or ASCII, no
    NULL bytes or control characters</p>
  </blockquote>
  
  <p>I've also tried:</p>
  
  <pre><code>el.ext = etree.CDATA('Disponible Ã  partir du 1er Octobre')
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>However I get the same error.</p>
  
  <p>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.</p>