UnicodeDecodeError with mssql3 in nvarchar field

[Tim Richardson]

I have a unicode string retrieved via a query from a different database on the same Windows Server (MS SQL 2008) .

It is a name with an accent. At the time I process it, it is an intermediate variable with type unicode. 

When I try to save it to an nvarchar column, I get an error  

File "C:\Users\tim\web2py_dev\gluon\packages\dal\pydal\adapters\base.py", line 523, in update
    raise e
UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xc3 in position 137: ordinal not in range(128)

this is python 2.7 on Window Server 2008.

I get the error both on web2py 2.16.1 which checked-out DAL v17.11, 

and in 2.14.6 with DAL v16.03

I'm using mssql3. Apart from the connection string, I am only using lazy_tables

The database collation is Latin1_General_CI_AS

The database column was varchar up until me encountering this problem; now it is nvarchar. 

 

I don't understand this at all. Where is "ascii" coming from? Is there some lingering table migration which is confusing the DAL? 

[Massimo Di Pierro]

 Latin1_General_CI_AS must a configuration parameter of your database. web2py only works with utf8