Unicode issues with pytest.fail

[AmatanHead]

Hello!

I'm passing a unicode-encoded string to pytest.fail with non-ascii symbols, e.g. pytest.fail(u'фыв'.encode('utf-8')) and I'm getting an invalid output �. Removing .encode('utf-8') restores things back to normal:

_________ test_unicode_non_unicode _________

    def test_unicode_non_unicode():
>       pytest.fail(u'фыв'.encode('utf-8'))
E       Failed: ������

test.py:14: Failed
___________ test_unicode_unicode ___________

    def test_unicode_unicode():
>       pytest.fail(u'фыв')
E       Failed: фыв

test.py:17: Failed

I've also ran into troubles using this with Jenkins CI (v2.41). Whenever I pass u'фыв' without .encode('utf-8'), py.test encodes it using unicode escape codec so I get \u0444\u044b\u0432. If I add export PYTHONIOENCODING=utf-8 before executing py.test, I get � (even without .encode('utf-8')).

Reproduced it in mac os and ubuntu 12.04. Python version is 2.7.13, also reproduces with 2.7.3. Py.test version is 3.0.6.
LC_ALL and similar settings all set to en_US.UTF-8 both in Jenkins and in my terminal.

[The-Compiler]

What if you do the same with print?

[AmatanHead]

It works fine:

>>> print u'фыв'.encode('utf-8')
фыв
>>> print u'фыв'
фыв

[kmantel]

I was able to produce a similar version of this in mac os on python 3.5.3 and pytest 3.6.0

______________________________________________ test_unicode_non_unicode _______________________________________________

    def test_unicode_non_unicode():
\x1b[1m>       pytest.fail(u'\u0444\u044b\u0432'.encode('utf-8'))\x1b[0m
E       Failed: <unprintable Failed object>

tests/test_unicode.py:5: Failed
________________________________________________ test_unicode_unicode _________________________________________________

    def test_unicode_unicode():
\x1b[1m>       pytest.fail(u'\u0444\u044b\u0432')\x1b[0m
\x1b[1m\x1b[31mE       Failed: \u0444\u044b\u0432\x1b[0m

tests/test_unicode.py:9: Failed```

is pytest intended to support messages like this?

[asottile]

hello, first off thank you for the issue!

python 2.x support has ended for pytest core.

we've decided in #7296 to close the python-2-specific issues to free up some space in our backlog. however, in accordance to our python 2.7 and 3.4 support community patches will still be accepted to the 4.6 series to fix bugs for python 2. (so if this issue is important to you and you have a patch to fix it, feel free to make a PR targeting the 4.6.x branch despite this ticket being closed).