utf-8 encode xml strings

[rajanski]

I ran into some problems when there where special chars within the xml (layer title for example) . I needed to use data=data.encode('utf-8') to make requests work

[jacklinna]

maybe remove it

[iboates]

@rajanski Can you give me a specific example about which method you were calling and what you were passing? Generally you should always use utf-8 when possible, and if your source data is not in utf-8 then I think using .encode("utf-8") is a reasonable expectation.