diff --git a/src/PVE/CLIFormatter.pm b/src/PVE/CLIFormatter.pm
index d93bed6..758809e 100644
--- a/src/PVE/CLIFormatter.pm
+++ b/src/PVE/CLIFormatter.pm
@@ -27,7 +27,8 @@ PVE::JSONSchema::register_renderer('bytes', \&PVE::Format::render_bytes);
 sub render_yaml {
     my ($value) = @_;
 
-    my $data = YAML::XS::Dump($value);
+    # YAML::XS returns UTF-8 encoded output, but renderers need to return text
+    my $data = decode('UTF-8', YAML::XS::Dump($value));
     $data =~ s/^---[\n\s]//; # remove yaml marker
 
     return $data;
diff --git a/test/format_test.pl b/test/format_test.pl
index 8ccfd5a..2b9460d 100644
--- a/test/format_test.pl
+++ b/test/format_test.pl
@@ -45,6 +45,7 @@ my $render_data = [
     ["bytes", 1024, undef, "1.00 KiB"],
     ["bytes", 1024 * 1024 * 123 + 1024 * 300, 1, "123.3 MiB"],
     ["bytes", 1024 * 1024 * 1024 * 1024 * 4 + 1024 * 1024 * 2048 * 8, undef, "4.02 TiB"],
+    ["yaml", { description => "Erkl\x{e4}rung" }, undef, "description: Erkl\x{e4}rung\n"],
 ];
 
 foreach my $data (@$render_data) {