Remove unintended b'...' around branch name

The variable branch is a bytes object, which means that when converting this to
string using str(), it gets an unintended b'...'. This is resolved by decoding
the bytes object using branch.decode('utf-8') as done elsewhere in the script.

This problem otherwise occurs using both python2.7 and python3.3.
change encoding name to lowercase
use unicode escape characters for symbols