I'm working with some backend code that can't handle unicode very well which proves to be a bit of a problem with Django models. At the moment I just have some functions in the model that cast each parameter into a str(), and when I need the ASCII strings I just call that. But, I really doubt that's the optimal solution.
Is there any way to tell Django to give me the parameters as ASCII? Or if not, is there a way I can implement a generic solution that doesn't involve me writing accessors for each parameter?