column.startswith doesn't work with unicode fields

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/colubrid/debug.py", line 919, in __call__
    result = self.application(environ, start_response)
  File "/home/blackbird/Development/pocoo/trunk/pocoo/application.py", line 172, in __call__
    resp = handler.handle_request(req, **args)
  File "/home/blackbird/Development/pocoo/trunk/pocoo/pkg/core/pages.py", line 396, in handle_request
    hide_internal=True
  File "/home/blackbird/Development/pocoo/trunk/pocoo/pkg/core/user.py", line 44, in get_user_list
    q.append(u.username.startswith(letter))
  File "build/bdist.linux-i686/egg/sqlalchemy/sql.py", line 550, in startswith
UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\xf6' in position 0: ordinal not in range(128)

Happens when i do the following:

    u = users.c
    r = ctx.engine.execute(meta.select([u.username, u.email,
                                        u.profile, u.last_login,
                                        u.register_date, u.post_count](u.user_id,),
                                        meta.and_(*q),
                                        order_by=[order(order_by)](order(order_by))))

(meta == the sqlalchemy module)

The problem is that the code does the following:

    def startswith(self, other):
        return self._compare('LIKE', str(other) + "%")

And because the unicode data (in my case the german umlaut "ä") doesn't fit into ascii sqlalchemy can't handle that.

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