From 16860509f8eda95fc3acfb4a88eb686842c9f424 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
From: David Stephens <dstephens99@gmail.com>
Date: Sat, 6 Dec 2014 12:44:13 -0800
Subject: [PATCH] BUG: Datareader index name shows unicode characters

---
 doc/source/whatsnew/v0.15.2.txt | 1 +
 doc/source/whatsnew/v0.16.0.txt | 2 ++
 pandas/io/data.py               | 8 ++++++++
 pandas/io/tests/test_data.py    | 6 ++++++
 4 files changed, 17 insertions(+)

diff --git a/doc/source/whatsnew/v0.15.2.txt b/doc/source/whatsnew/v0.15.2.txt
index 02de919e3f83e..22a89b465ad7d 100644
--- a/doc/source/whatsnew/v0.15.2.txt
+++ b/doc/source/whatsnew/v0.15.2.txt
@@ -239,3 +239,4 @@ Bug Fixes
 - Bug where passing a unit to the TimedeltaIndex constructor applied the to nano-second conversion twice. (:issue:`9011`).
 - Bug in plotting of a period-like array (:issue:`9012`)
 
+
diff --git a/doc/source/whatsnew/v0.16.0.txt b/doc/source/whatsnew/v0.16.0.txt
index b3ac58a9fb84a..931b8009d8cf0 100644
--- a/doc/source/whatsnew/v0.16.0.txt
+++ b/doc/source/whatsnew/v0.16.0.txt
@@ -202,3 +202,5 @@ Bug Fixes
 - Fixed issue in the ``xlsxwriter`` engine where it added a default 'General' format to cells if no other format wass applied. This prevented other row or column formatting being applied. (:issue:`9167`)
 - Fixes issue with ``index_col=False`` when ``usecols`` is also specified in ``read_csv``. (:issue:`9082`)
 - Bug where ``wide_to_long`` would modify the input stubnames list (:issue:`9204`)
+- Bug in Datareader index name shows unicode characters (:issue:`8967`)
+
diff --git a/pandas/io/data.py b/pandas/io/data.py
index b5cf5f9d9be19..72729d7a189f6 100644
--- a/pandas/io/data.py
+++ b/pandas/io/data.py
@@ -171,6 +171,14 @@ def _retry_read_url(url, retry_count, pause, name):
             # return 2 rows for the most recent business day
             if len(rs) > 2 and rs.index[-1] == rs.index[-2]:  # pragma: no cover
                 rs = rs[:-1]
+
+            #Get rid of unicode characters in index name.
+            try:
+                rs.index.name = rs.index.name.decode('unicode_escape').encode('ascii', 'ignore')
+            except AttributeError:
+                #Python 3 string has no decode method.
+                rs.index.name = rs.index.name.encode('ascii', 'ignore').decode()
+
             return rs
 
     raise IOError("after %d tries, %s did not "
diff --git a/pandas/io/tests/test_data.py b/pandas/io/tests/test_data.py
index 2d6f14c79633a..df6a8fe2005be 100644
--- a/pandas/io/tests/test_data.py
+++ b/pandas/io/tests/test_data.py
@@ -126,6 +126,12 @@ def test_dtypes(self):
         assert np.issubdtype(data.High.dtype, np.number)
         assert np.issubdtype(data.Volume.dtype, np.number)
 
+    def test_unicode_date(self):
+        #GH8967
+        data = web.get_data_google('F', start='JAN-01-10', end='JAN-27-13')
+        self.assertEquals(data.index.name, 'Date')
+
+
 class TestYahoo(tm.TestCase):
     @classmethod
     def setUpClass(cls):