Having trouble with special characters, punctuation, etc., in my Python-MySQL program

I have an MySQL database called zingers. The structure is:

zid - integer, key, autoincrement
keyword - varchar
citation - text
quotation - text


I am having trouble storing text, as typed in latter two fields.
Special characters and punctuation all seem not to be stored and
retrieved correctly.

Special apostrophes and single quotes from Microsoft Word are causing a
special problem, even though I have ''ed all 's

perhaps the encoding of the database itself should be different? it is
currenlty latin_swedish_ci

Input and output is through a browser.

I think my problem may be that I need to encode the string before
saving it in the databse. Can anyone point me in the right direction
here?


Thanks so much,

-rsr-