Hi List, I don't know much about encodings, so please excuse any ignorance I display. I am having a problem with encodings. I have restructuredText objects, and text fields in a database that are interpreted as restructuredText. Either of these can be edited by lay people, and in many cases, will be copied wholesale from Word. This produces a problem when these pages are viewed, because they contain improper characters, such as the ones mentioned in this article: http://effbot.org/zone/unicode-gremlins.htm This article presents a way to convert these characters to Unicode, which seems to work quite well, in and of itself. However, if I retrieve database fields, convert them, and then attempt to reinsert them, with the unicode characters, I get a UnicodeEncodeError, because it is attempting to encode these characters as ascii before inserting them in the database. What are possible solutions to these problems? Is there are standard practice that needs to be followed? Should I maintain the data as it is, and simply convert it to unicode before display? Alternatively, should I enforce a policy where those characters cannot be used? Is unicode the encoding I should be using? Thanks for any help. Alec Munro