So I’ve been going out of my mind trying to figure out why something like:
Pham’s would look like Pham’s
After searching as much as I could into django and unicode, I found this article which worked.
As near as my feeble USA-centric “cafes not cafés” understood it, my data was encoded incorrectly, and PHP’s mysql ignores encoding and expects UTF-8 whereas django tries to understand the encoding.