diff --git a/django/views/debug.py b/django/views/debug.py
index ed99d8dfe6..c59fe31fc8 100644
--- a/django/views/debug.py
+++ b/django/views/debug.py
@@ -360,7 +360,7 @@ class ExceptionReporter(object):
             # (http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0263/)
             match = re.search(br'coding[:=]\s*([-\w.]+)', line)
             if match:
-                encoding = match.group(1)
+                encoding = match.group(1).decode('ascii')
                 break
         source = [six.text_type(sline, encoding, 'replace') for sline in source]
 
diff --git a/tests/regressiontests/views/tests/debug.py b/tests/regressiontests/views/tests/debug.py
index 8592b07efe..e616d184b8 100644
--- a/tests/regressiontests/views/tests/debug.py
+++ b/tests/regressiontests/views/tests/debug.py
@@ -1,3 +1,6 @@
+# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
+# This coding header is significant for tests, as the debug view is parsing
+# files to search for such a header to decode the source file content
 from __future__ import absolute_import, unicode_literals
 
 import inspect