Simple unicode-safe version of str(exception)?

[Russell E. Owen]

I have code like this:
except Exception, e:
   self.setState(self.Failed, str(e))
which fails if the exception contains a unicode argument.

I did, of course, try unicode(e) but that fails.

The following works, but seems rather messy:

except Exception, e:
    errStr = ",".join([unicode(s) for s in f.args])
    self.setState(self.Failed, errStr)

Is there a simpler solution that works in Python 2.3-2.5?

-- Russell