CLC-3432: User alert feature can't handle diacriticals - PR #2

https://jira.ets.berkeley.edu/jira/browse/CLC-3432

Stopped using the magic header # encoding: utf-8
Stopped using Nokogiri for parsing the xml file since that's where the diacriticals were getting lost.
So, instead of using Nokogiri, I used the Hash.from_xml method which doesn't make a mess of the data encoding, namely UTF-8 which should be the standard encoding everywhere.
Updated specs to stop testing for Nokogiri parsing errors and replaced them with a test for detecting parsing errors that could be returned by Hash.from_xml.
Exceptions are muted and logged as errors.
Merge pull request #2418 from chikoon/CLC-3432-UTF-8-alerts

CLC-3432: User alert feature can't handle diacriticals - PR #2