Given an iterable, returns its items as a list, with any non-string items
    converted to unicode strings.

def stringify(data):
    '''
    Given an iterable, returns its items as a list, with any non-string items
    converted to unicode strings.
    '''
    ret = []
    for item in data:
        if six.PY2 and isinstance(item, str):
            item = salt.utils.stringutils.to_unicode(item)
        elif not isinstance(item, six.string_types):
            item = six.text_type(item)
        ret.append(item)
    return ret