Some resources that might help understand character encoding:

• http://docs.python.org/library/functions.html#ord
• latin-1 IEC_8859-1
• UTF-8
• Unicode
• http://docs.python.org/howto/unicode.html#encodings
• http://mathiasbynens.be/notes/javascript-unicode
• http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6539881/python-converting-from-iso-8859-1-latin1-to-utf-8
• http://stackoverflow.com/questions/196345/how-to-check-if-a-string-in-python-is-in-ascii
• http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9235793/python-unicode-ascii-ordinal-not-in-range-frustrating-error

Tools / tables:

• available python encodings
• latin-1 IEC_8859-1
• UTF-8

Using python 2.7 so default character encoding is ISO 8859-1 (reference needed)