Want a list utf8 formatted but bytestrings found

[nikos]

Hello and thank you for the clear explanation, i tried the following after reading your post

	#populate client listing into list
	names.append( name )
    ....
    ....
	names.append( '' )
	names.sort()

	for name in names:
		name = name.encode('latin1').decode('utf8')

and the error that was presented was:

Output:
UnicodeEncodeError('latin-1', 'Άκης Τσιάμης', 0, 4, 'ordinal not in range(256)')

Why it cannot encode in latin nad decode in utf8 normally?
And since 'names' are being fetced from mysql database, which they were stored as utf8 strings WHY/HOW the 'names' enrolled in latin-1?