Characters aren't displayed correctly

[Hussein B]

On Mar 1, 11:27 pm, "J. Clifford Dyer" <j... at sdf.lonestar.org> wrote:
> On Sun, 2009-03-01 at 09:51 -0500, Philip Semanchuk wrote:
> > On Mar 1, 2009, at 8:31 AM, Hussein B wrote:
>
> > > Hey,
> > > I'm retrieving records from MySQL database that contains non english
> > > characters.
> > > Then I create a String that contains HTML markup and column values
> > > from the previous result set.
> > > +++++
> > > markup = u'''<table>.....'''
> > > for row in rows:
> > >     markup = markup + '<tr><td>' + row['id']
> > > markup = markup + '</table>
> > > +++++
> > > Then I'm sending the email according to this tip:
> > >http://code.activestate.com/recipes/473810/
> > > Well, the email contains ????? characters for each non english ones.
> > > Any ideas?
>
> > There's so many places where this could go wrong and you haven't  
> > narrowed down the problem.
>
> > Are the characters stored in the database correctly?
>
> > Are they stored consistently (i.e. all using the same encoding, not  
> > some using utf-8 and others using iso-8859-1)?
>
> > What are you getting out of the database? Is it being converted to  
> > Unicode correctly, or at all?
>
> > Are you sure that the program you're using to view the email  
> > understands the encoding?
>
> > Isolate those questions one at a time. Add some debugging breakpoints.  
> > Ensure that you have what you think you have. You might not fix your  
> > problem, but you will make it much smaller and more specific.
>
> > Good luck
> > Philip
>
> Let me add to that checklist:
>
> Are you sure the email you are creating has the encoding declared
> properly in the headers?
>
>
>
> > --
> >http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
>
> Cheers,
> Cliff

My HTML markup contains only table tags (you know, table, tr and td)