Simple unicode-safe version of str(exception)?

[Russell E. Owen]

In article <67on2nF2ol856U1 at mid.individual.net>,
 Bjoern Schliessmann <usenet-mail-0306.20.chr0n0ss at spamgourmet.com> 
 wrote:

> "Martin v. Löwis" wrote:
> 
> > e is an exception object, not a Unicode object.
> 
> Er, sure, thanks for pointing that out. At first sight he should
> substitute "e" with "e.message" then since he tries to convert to
> string (for display?).

No. e.message is only set if the exeption object receives exactly one 
argument.

That is why my replacement code reads:
    errStr = ",".join([unicode(s) for s in f.args])
    self.setState(self.Failed, errStr)
(where e is an Exception of some kind)

Notice that I'm iterating over the args. But again, this is far messier 
than:
    self.setState(self.Failed, str(e)

So...to repeat the original question, is there any simpler unicode-safe 
replacement for str(exception)?

-- Russell