character-2-ascii conversion please please please help !

its extremely stupid : I have a small livewire-informix database into which users can stuff data via netscape. Problem one : french users will be amongs them problem two : informix saiz 'Nada' to non-english characters such as e-grave and others (even a silly return is to much) now I tried parsing the input field before insertining it into the database. Major problem : the following statement doesn't work : if (request.title_field.charAt(i) == 213) ... do something because a character-integer comparision is not allowed. is there any way to figure out what the i-th character is ? typing if (request.title_field.charAt(i) == ''') ... do something will not work (the 3d-last character is an e-grave) simply because the unix text editor won't accept this character... please please please can anyone point me out how to convert a character into its numeric ascii code ?? thanks in a million in advance jeroen PS, the livewire 'escape()' function does NOT convert this stuff. It only handles returns and spaces. Not accents.