First make sure your DB encoding is UTF-8 not the latin1 > The error I keep having is something like this: > ERREUR: Séquence d'octets invalide pour le codage «UTF8» : 0xe02063
then try this: def smart_str(s, encoding='utf-8', errors='strict'): """ Returns a bytestring version of 's', encoded as specified in 'encoding'. """ if not isinstance(s, basestring): try: return str(s) except UnicodeEncodeError: return unicode(s).encode(encoding, errors) elif isinstance(s, unicode): return s.encode(encoding, errors) elif s and encoding != 'utf-8': return s.decode('utf-8', errors).encode(encoding, errors) else: return s -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list