utf-8 encoding removed

[raspbounty]

When using the tool it removes the line encoding="UTF-8" in the header of the svg and it is therefore not possible to use ä or ° in the template. Is there any workaround or fix?
Below is the basic code I used to test.

tpl = svglue.load(file="template.svg")
src = tpl.__str__().decode()
with open(outputsvg, 'w') as svgout:
    svgout.write(src)