Not an issue. Also should be fixed.

I did, still no dice... May just have to give up on this one.

Check closely all the places where you're decoding/encoding strings. It could be that you've already encoded that output string back to utf-8 elsewhere, which would explain why string's bytes are not in ascii range. In other words, you might be trying to encode the same string twice.

All of these superfluous encoding/decoding issues could be get rid of if the tests themselves simply declared these strings as unicode in the first place.

I'm getting the opposite error: output.encode('utf-8') returns a Decode error:
UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xe3 in position 0: ordinal not in range(128)

I decode all my utf-8 inputs, but it's failing on the last encode.

(using python 2.7)

It seems fine to me. You could post you code here as a spoiler and I could have a look if you want.

In Python, text sent to console using print() don't show up in the Output section.