lxml unicode entity parse problems

Question

I\'m using lxml as follows to parse an exported XML file from another system:

xmldoc = open(filename)
etree.parse(xmldoc)

But im getting:

Answer 1

eacute is not a predefined entity in XML. To include an é entity reference in an XML file, it must have a <!DOCTYPE> declaration pointing to a DTD (such as an XHTML 1.0 DTD) that defines the entity.

If the XML uses é but doesn't have a <!DOCTYPE>, it is not well-formed and the system that exported it needs to be fixed.

(There isn't a good reason to use an entity reference to represent é in an XML file. The character reference é is understood everywhere without entity definitions, if the file can't simply include a raw UTF-8 é for some reason.)