Is this the right fix? I am looking at http://docs.python-requests.org/en/latest/api/#requests.Response and `content` seems to be raw response while `text` should be converted to unicode (using Response.encoding). Maybe the problem is not with requests but with ET? See http://docs.python.org/2/library/xml.etree.elementtree.html?highlight=elementtree#xml.etree.ElementTree.fromstring which does not say anything about encoding or unicode.