title: using String.startswith() with a unicode string
body: <p>I am trying to trim a string scraped from an HTML page using BeautifulSoup.  It starts with </p>
  
  <pre><code>&amp;#160;–&amp;#160;
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>in the html page.  I am trying the following code:</p>
  
  <pre><code>if thestring.startswith(unichr(160) + '-' + unichr(160)):
      print "found starting sequence"
      thestring= thestring[3:]
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>However, I the <code>if</code> condition is not being triggered (as confirmed by the fact that my print statement is not happening).  How do I set up that condition?</p>
  
  <p>(Also in some cases, thestring is initially only those 3 characters, in which case I want thestring to end up as the empty string -- will this do it or will I need to separately test for that case?)</p>