Huh, ok, so I have this massive problem with encodings and I just do not know how to deal with it. After two days of Google searches I think I just run out of options :)

What I want to do is the following.

1. Place text in a textbox on a website
2. Send the text to the backend (written in Python)
3. Use the text to create:
   a. An image in PIL.
   b. An entry in MySQL.

Now all of this works smoothly when we're talking about regular characters. But when I try to use Korean, Polish, Japanese characters I get very weird looking characters inserted in both the image and the database. In the examples below I'll use a three character string of Polish characters - "ąść".

Here's what I have done after Googling.

Inserted the following in .htaccess:

AddCharset UTF-8 .py .css .js .html

My python file now starts with:

#!/usr/bin/python
# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-

All of my MySQL databases are encoded in "utf8_unicode_ci".

Now, here's an example of what I'm trying to do... Whenever I parse "ąść" (three Polish characters) it gets saved in the database and generated on the image as:

Ä...ść

Now, a few debugging issues. I go directly to Python and assign the following to the variable (value_text1) that usually has its text parsed (so - no text parsing, simply set fixed text to generate the image with and put into the database):

A) If I go with value_text1 = 'ąść' I get ...ść as a result.

B) If I go with value_text1 = u'ąść' I get the following error message:

UnicodeEncodeError: 'latin-1' codec can't encode characters in position 0-1: ordinal not in range(256)

C) If I go with value_text1 = u'ąść'.encode('UTF-8') I get ...ść as a result.

D) If I go with value_text1 = u'\u0105\u015B\u0107'.encode('UTF-8'), where "\u0105\u015B\u0107" is the actual unicode for "ąść" I get ...ść as a result.

Really no clue what I'm doing wrong - server settings, python file settings, wrong command? Will appreciate any thoughts, huge thank you in advance.