was trying that but kept getting an error that there was no element at line 1 col 0.

also, note that parsing form a string can not return a full tree but just a single element.  the only method that returns a full tree is .parse() and it only accepts a file as its source apparently.

Returns element instance:
http://docs.python.org/2/library/xml.etree.elementtree.html#xml.etree.ElementTree.fromstring

Returns entire tree:
http://docs.python.org/2/library/xml.etree.elementtree.html#xml.etree.ElementTree.parse