title: Creating xml node from Unicode string (encoding declaration not supported)?
body: <p>I have a database field which is storing an XML document as Unicode. However, when I fetch the field and try and initiate an <code>lxml</code> node, I get the following error:</p>
  
  <pre><code>node = etree.fromstring(self.xml)
  ValueError: Unicode strings with encoding declaration are not supported. Please use bytes input or XML fragments without declaration.
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>The text I current have (<code>self.xml</code>) contains Japanese characters, etc. How would I create the node?</p>