Unicode column names not supported

[ChrisBeaumont]

In the following line:

https://github.com/atpy/atpy/blob/master/atpy/basetable.py#L563

name might be a unicode string. However, my version of numpy (1.7) doesn't support unicode names passed to dtype at

https://github.com/atpy/atpy/blob/master/atpy/basetable.py#L579

This leads to a TypeError:

In [31]: np.array(zip([1,2]), dtype=[('ID', np.dtype('int32'))])
Out[31]: 
array([(1,), (2,)], 
      dtype=[('ID', '<i4')])

In [32]: np.array(zip([1,2]), dtype=[(u'ID', np.dtype('int32'))])
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
TypeError                                 Traceback (most recent call last)
<ipython-input-32-b3fe14be618a> in <module>()
----> 1 np.array(zip([1,2]), dtype=[(u'ID', np.dtype('int32'))])

TypeError: data type not understood

One workaround is to coerce name to a non-unicode string.