diff --git a/src/plugins/plugin_misc_text_syntaxes.py b/src/plugins/plugin_misc_text_syntaxes.py
index 0663dfb2..f6ff1e0b 100755
--- a/src/plugins/plugin_misc_text_syntaxes.py
+++ b/src/plugins/plugin_misc_text_syntaxes.py
@@ -182,7 +182,7 @@ class TextSyntaxes(object):
             xhtml_elt = cleaner.clean_html(xhtml_elt)
             for elt in xhtml_elt.xpath("//*[@style]"):
                 elt.set("style", clean_style(elt.get('style')))
-            return html.tostring(xhtml_elt, method='xml')
+            return html.tostring(xhtml_elt, encoding=unicode, method='xml')
 
         return deferToThread(blocking_cleaning, xhtml)
 
@@ -256,4 +256,4 @@ class TextSyntaxes(object):
         """
         cleaner = clean.Cleaner(kill_tags=['style'])
         cleaned = cleaner.clean_html(html.fromstring(xhtml))
-        return html.tostring(cleaned, method="text")
+        return html.tostring(cleaned, encoding=unicode, method="text")