Thanks, this does work.

But, where can I find the piece of information you just gave to me in 
the docs? I couldn't find any interface definition for Exceptions.

Further more will this be regarded as a bug?
From [1] I understand that "unicode(e)" and "unicode(e, 'utf8')" are 
supposed to work. No limitations are made on the type of the object. 
And I suppose that unicode() is the exact equivalent of str() in that 
it copes with unicode strings. Not expecting the string representation 
of an Exception to return a Unicode string when its content is 
non-ASCII where as this kind of behaviour of simple string conversion 
is wished for with ASCII text seems unlikely cumbersome.

Please reopen if my report does have a point.

[1] http://docs.python.org/lib/built-in-funcs.html