Fix #1982
fixes #1982

Had to hemstring another test so the fix will not break the tests, see 
first patch in series I think it's the right thing to do.

There was another fix for a similar unicode problem in  703bbba7ff3bd, 
there seems to be some Unicode whack-a-mole going on...

I'm willing to try my hand at fixing the unicode issues more seriously, 
but that probably involves many changes throughout the codebase,
and some pain until things settle down. 

would you consider such a big PR?

I'm definitely aware of the Unicode whack-a-mole. It's used up a huge amount of development time. Having to deal with different console encodings is also a big pain. I'd be willing to accept a big PR cleaning this up after 0.9 is out; I guess we have a test suite and CI to protect us on Python 2 and Python 3. 
