Perspective Table excel report

I get an error on the line that calls the toExcel() function:

Error running action 'component.onActionPerformed' on DataSetPlayGround@C/root/Button: Traceback (most recent call last): File "<function:runAction>", line 13, in runAction TypeError: can't convert [9, u'Test'] to com.inductiveautomation.ignition.common.Dataset

The data type from the DB is an nvarchar. Is there a simple way to strip the unicode character u off the string?

Thanks