I'm confused. Consider this code working the way I expect: >>> foo = u'Émilie and Juañ are turncoats.' >>> bar = "foo is %s" % foo >>> bar u'foo is \xc3\x89milie and Jua\xc3\xb1 are turncoats.' And this code not at all working the way I expect: >>> try: ... raise Exception(foo) ... except Exception as e: ... foo2 = e ... >>> bar = "foo2 is %s" % foo2 ------------------------------------------------------------ Traceback (most recent call last): File "<ipython console>", line 1, in <module> UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode characters in position 0-1: ordinal not in range(128) Can someone explain what's going on here? Why does it matter whether the unicode data is in a plain unicode string or stored in an Exception object? And why does this fix it: >>> bar = u"foo2 is %s" % foo2 >>> bar u'foo2 is \xc3\x89milie and Jua\xc3\xb1 are turncoats.' I am quite confused! Thanks for the help! UPDATE: My coding buddy Randall has added to my confusion in an attempt to help me! Send in the reinforcements to explain how this is supposed to make sense: >>> class A: ... def __str__(self): return "string" ... def __unicode__(self): return "unicode" ... >>> "%s %s" % (u'niño', A()) u'ni\xc3\xb1o unicode' >>> "%s %s" % (A(), u'niño') u'string ni\xc3\xb1o' Note that the order of the arguments here determines which method is called!