chr for non-ASCII characters in Python

I'm trying to implement a search through a list of strings, in a context where there's no way to use something like `str.startswith` (If you're curious about it, I'm querying the app engine datastore.) I'd like to look for every string that has a certain prefix, let's say 'py'. I have comparison operators at my disposal, so I was thinking I could implement this as follows. ``` #pseudo code search = "py" search_strings_where(s > search, s < chr(ord(search[0]) + 1) ``` The `chr(ord(search[0]) + 1)` is supposed to be the character that's in lexicographical order right after the first character of the search query. The problem is that this won't work. take for example `ord(u"‰")`, which returns 8240. But putting that into `chr`again raises an error. ``` ValueError: chr() arg not in range(256) ``` How could I solve this? EDIT Just found out about unichr, checking if this works. I will write an answer if it does.