Passing utf8 encoded strings from python to a C++ function taking a
std::string was broken.  The previous version was trying to call
'PyUnicode_FromObject' on this data, which failed to convert the string
to unicode with the default ascii codec. Also this incurs an unnecessary
conversion to unicode for data this is immediately converted back to
utf8.

Fix by treating python 2 strings the same python 3 bytes objects, and just
copying over the data if possible.