Cannot authenticate with accented chars

[anonymous]

If there is an accented char (like ò) in the login field, the authentication fails with the following error (see the last row):

Trac[store] DEBUG: LDAPAuth: Unexpected error: Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "build/bdist.linux-x86_64/egg/ldapauth/store.py", line 69, in check_password
    bind_cn = self._search_user(conn, user)
  File "build/bdist.linux-x86_64/egg/ldapauth/store.py", line 129, in _search_user
    self.search_filter % user)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.6/dist-packages/ldap/ldapobject.py", line 516, in search_s
    return self.search_ext_s(base,scope,filterstr,attrlist,attrsonly,None,None,timeout=self.timeout)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.6/dist-packages/ldap/ldapobject.py", line 509, in search_ext_s
    msgid = self.search_ext(base,scope,filterstr,attrlist,attrsonly,serverctrls,clientctrls,timeout,sizelimit)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.6/dist-packages/ldap/ldapobject.py", line 505, in search_ext
    timeout,sizelimit,
  File "/usr/lib/python2.6/dist-packages/ldap/ldapobject.py", line 96, in _ldap_call
    result = func(*args,**kwargs)
UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\xf2' in position 39: ordinal not in range(128)

May be a solution could be to encode('utf-8')? ​http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1652904/unicodeencodeerror-ascii-codec-cant-encode-character

If this cannot be fixed in the TracLdapAuthPlugin code, what can be done to avoid this issue? Thanks