Improve error message handling in exceptionsrefactor/excpetion_msg

* Depending on the request Gitlab has a 'message' or 'error' attribute
in the json data, handle both
* Add some consistency by converting messages to unicode or str for
exceptions (depending on the python version)

Closes #616

1 files changed, 6 insertions, 1 deletions

diff --git a/gitlab/exceptions.py b/gitlab/exceptions.py
index 650328a..0822d3e 100644
--- a/gitlab/exceptions.py
+++ b/gitlab/exceptions.py
@@ -28,7 +28,12 @@ class GitlabError(Exception):
         # Full http response
         self.response_body = response_body
         # Parsed error message from gitlab
-        self.error_message = error_message
+        try:
+            # if we receive str/bytes we try to convert to unicode/str to have
+            # consistent message types (see #616)
+            self.error_message = error_message.decode()
+        except Exception:
+            self.error_message = error_message
 
     def __str__(self):
         if self.response_code is not None: