Characters aren't displayed correctly

[Hussein B]

On Mar 2, 4:31 pm, John Machin <sjmac... at lexicon.net> wrote:
> On Mar 2, 7:30 pm, Hussein B <hubaghd... at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > On Mar 1, 4:51 pm, Philip Semanchuk <phi... at semanchuk.com> 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.
>
> Can you reveal which language???
>
>
>
Arabic

> > > > 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?
>
> > Yes they are.
>
> How do you KNOW that they are stored correctly? What makes you so
> sure?
>
>
Because MySQL Query Browser displays them correctly, in addition I use
BIRT as the reporting system and it shows them correctly.

>
> > > Are they stored consistently (i.e. all using the same encoding, not  
> > > some using utf-8 and others using iso-8859-1)?
>
> > Yes.
>
> So what is the encoding used to store them?
>
>
>
Tables are created with UTF-8 encoding option

> > > What are you getting out of the database? Is it being converted to  
> > > Unicode correctly, or at all?
>
> > I don't know, how to make sure of this point?
>
> You could show us some of the output from the database query. As well
> as
>    print the_output
> you should
>    print repr(the_output)
> and show us both, and also tell us what you *expect* to see.
>

The result of print repr(row['name']) is '??? ??????'
The '?' characters are supposed to be Arabic characters.

> And let's get the database output sorted out before we worry about the
> email message.

Thanks all for help.