Hi Alec, as you discovered, character encodings can be a pain. Before I give any advice, let us know some more about your application. - Do your users use more then one language? - Do your users use more then one encoding? (Russian, Chinese, ... have several encodings for the same language.) - Have you specified which encoding Zope should use when answering requests? - What database do you use? - What is the default encoding for your database? What encoding is the data stored in? - Did you specify your client encoding for the database connection? Usually a browser will send data back in the encoding the page containing the form was encoded. So it would be a good idea to specify the encoding in your page header. Please check your web server set up too, sometimes the web server specifies the encoding in the http header. Use Unicode strings in your scripts and don't return printed, return a Unicode string. That will allow Zope to convert the string to the desired encoding to answer a request. Databases often will convert encodings too. From there storage to the clients encoding and vice versa. Therefor it is important to specify both correctly. If you use only one encoding try to use it everywhere, even as database encoding. Otherwise it would be a good idea to use UTF-8 as database encoding. Ulrich -- Ulrich Wisser RELEVANT TRAFFIC SWEDEN AB, Riddarg 17A, SE-114 57 Sthlm, Sweden Direct (+46)86789755 || Cell (+46)704467893 || Fax (+46)86789769 ________________________________________________________________ http://www.relevanttraffic.com