fall back to repr() when we can't actually decode a failure message, fixes #14

Makefile

@@ -8,6 +8,9 @@ rednose-local.xml: rednose.xml
 	0launch http://gfxmonk.net/dist/0install/0local.xml rednose.xml rednose-local.xml
 
 test: rednose-local.xml
-	0launch http://0install.net/2008/interfaces/0test.xml rednose-local.xml http://repo.roscidus.com/python/python 2.7.2-7 3.2.2-0
+	0launch http://0install.net/2008/interfaces/0test.xml \
+		rednose-local.xml \
+		http://repo.roscidus.com/python/python \
+		2.7.3-6 3.2.3-5
 	
 .PHONY: 0 pypi

encoding_test.py

@@ -0,0 +1,7 @@
+# vim: fileencoding=utf-8:
+
+#NOTE: this file does *not* import unicode_literals,
+# so the assertion message is actually just utf-8 bytes
+
+def test():
+	assert False, "ä"

rednose.py

@@ -44,7 +44,14 @@ skip = 'skipped'
 line_length = 77
 
 PY3 = sys.version_info[0] >= 3
-to_unicode = str if PY3 else unicode
+if PY3:
+	to_unicode = str
+else:
+	def to_unicode(s):
+		try:
+			return unicode(s)
+		except UnicodeDecodeError:
+			return unicode(repr(str(s)))
 
 BLACKLISTED_WRITERS = [
 	'nose[\\/]result\\.pyc?$',