(QENG-912) Beaker 1.14 breaks PE Puppet Acceptance

- seems to be an issue with string encoding
- ensure that we convert from current encoding to utf-8, doesn't mangle
  utf-8 strings and correctly converts binary strings
Merge pull request #350 from anodelman/utf-8-encoding

(QENG-912) Beaker 1.14 breaks PE Puppet Acceptance