-this_version = subprocess.Popen(shlex.split('git tag -l --points-at HEAD'), stdout=subprocess.PIPE).communicate()[0]
-last_version = subprocess.Popen(shlex.split('git describe --tags --abbrev=0'), stdout=subprocess.PIPE).communicate()[0]
+this_version = subprocess.Popen(shlex.split('git tag -l --points-at HEAD'), stdout=subprocess.PIPE).communicate()[0].decode('UTF-8')
+last_version = subprocess.Popen(shlex.split('git describe --tags --abbrev=0'), stdout=subprocess.PIPE).communicate()[0].decode('UTF-8')