Dealing with "funny" characters

[sophie_newbie]

Hi, I want to store python text strings that characters like "é" "Č"
in a mysql varchar text field. Now my problem is that mysql does not
seem to accept these characters. I'm wondering if there is any way I
can somehow "encode" these characters to appear as normal characters
and then "decode" them when I want to get them out of the database
again?

-Thanks.