title: lxml.html working with unicode data
body: <p>I am trying to scrape data from a website, but the data is returned as unicode. I want to convert it back to normal string. Here is my code:</p>
  
  <pre><code>from lxml import html
  list1=[]
  tree = lxml.html.parse('http://www.qe.com.qa/pps/qe/qe%20english%20portal/Pages/Company%20Profile%20Pages/QE%20Company%20Profile?CompanyCode=GWCS')
  list1.extend(tree.xpath('//*[@id="marketUpdate_lastTrade"]/text()'))
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>And here is the output I get:</p>
  
  <pre><code>&gt;&gt;&gt; list1
  [u'\xa0']
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>However, the actual data on the webpage is the following:</p>
  
  <pre><code>&lt;td align="right" id="marketUpdate_lastTrade" class="compProfileTextBold"&gt;62.90&lt;/td&gt;
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>How could I get to the string '62.90'?</p>