If you're running into the problem where unicode items in your Django / MySQL project are displayed as question marks, here's the likely problem and solution, found in this django-users thread:
The likely problem is that your MySQL encoding is set to latin1, as opposed to utf8. You can check this via:
mysqld --verbose --help | grep character-set
You'll probably see:
character-set-server latin1
You want this to be uft8. To modify it, edit your my.conf file ( /etc/mysql/my.conf on ubuntu ), adding the following lines to the appropriate sections:
[client]
...
default-character-set = utf8
[mysqld]
...
character-set-server=utf8
collation-server=utf8_unicode_ci
init_connect='set collation_connection = utf8_unicode_ci;'
Now restart mysql:
sudo /etc/init.d/mysql restart
And alter your existing tables to use the utf8 encoding:
mysql your_db_name
alter table your_table_name convert to character set utf8;
And that should do it.