diff --git a/spacy/tests/regression/test_issue1799.py b/spacy/tests/regression/test_issue1799.py
index 3a2ff5ba7..6695a5357 100644
--- a/spacy/tests/regression/test_issue1799.py
+++ b/spacy/tests/regression/test_issue1799.py
@@ -1,5 +1,6 @@
 '''Test sentence boundaries are deserialized correctly,
 even for non-projective sentences.'''
+from __future__ import unicode_literals
 
 import pytest
 import numpy