BUG: Datareader index name shows unicode characters

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`)
 
+

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`)
+

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 "

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):