[Tutor] Help with ODBC, SQL & Unicode

[Charlie Clark]

Dear list,

it's been a bit of a struggle this week: databases are not my strong 
point. After a couple of days working out how to set timestamps in an 
SQL-database I'm now closer to understanding parameters. There's a catch 
however.

consider the following bit of code

c.execute('INSERT INTO my_table \ 
		(strHeadline, dtTimestampIn, iMarked)\ 
		VALUES (?, ?, ?)', 
		(headline, time.localtime(time.time()[:6], 1)) 

where c is my cursor object and headline a string and I'm using mxODBC 
for the connection.

This only works for strings which only contain 7-bit ASCII characters. 
But I've got German text which is full of ä, ö, ü and ß. Up until 
now I've been working with formatted strings which avoids this problem 
but is really difficult to use when it comes to setting the date. What's 
the correct way to do this?

Thanx very much

Charlie