Added a formatter class to handle unicode with syslog

import logging

class EncodingFormatter(logging.Formatter, object):

    def __init__(self, fmt=None, datefmt=None, encoding='utf-8'):

        super(EncodingFormatter, self).__init__(fmt, datefmt)

        self._encoding = encoding

    def formatException(self, ei):

        expt = super(EncodingFormatter, self).formatException(ei)

        if isinstance(expt, str):

            expt = expt.decode(self._encoding, 'replace')

        return expt

    def format(self, record):

        msg = super(EncodingFormatter, self).format(record)

        if isinstance(msg, unicode):

            msg = msg.encode(self._encoding, 'replace')

        return msg