Merge pull request #686 from jszakmeister/fix-issue-649

Fix #649: UnicodeDecodeError when an exception contains encoded strings

1 files changed, 6 insertions, 1 deletions

diff --git a/nose/plugins/capture.py b/nose/plugins/capture.py
index ecea8ff..224f0a5 100644
--- a/nose/plugins/capture.py
+++ b/nose/plugins/capture.py
@@ -89,7 +89,12 @@ class Capture(Plugin):
         if isinstance(ev, BaseException):
             if hasattr(ev, '__unicode__'):
                 # 2.6+
-                ev = unicode(ev)
+                try:
+                    ev = unicode(ev)
+                except UnicodeDecodeError:
+                    # We need a unicode string... take our best shot at getting,
+                    # since we don't know what the original encoding is in.
+                    ev = str(ev).decode('utf8', 'replace')
             else:
                 # 2.5-
                 if not hasattr(ev, 'message'):