Special characters in varchar/text fields

The question I tried to post yesterday never made it to the list at all, but
in the spirit of blind optimism I'm trying again with a new one.

I'm transferring an existing FileMaker Pro database into PostgreSQL for an
art gallery, and a number of the artist's names and some image titles are
French, and thus contain accents or other special characters. FileMaker
directly supports accented characters as well as styled text (bold, italics
etc.), but PostgreSQL to my knowledge does not, so for these things to show
up properly on the web, the special characters need to be converted into the
proper ASCII codes (and any text formatting needs to be done in HTML).

While it probably wouldn't be too much of a nuisance to do a global replace
for accented characters in a text editor after exporting the FileMaker
databases as tab-delimited text, we still have the question of how to handle
new input into the database once it's up, which will be through a PHP web
form. The new information will probably be entered by a motley assortment of
gallery staff, interns and volunteers, many of whom will not be all that
computer literate, so expecting them to remember all the ASCII codes is a
bit of a stretch (the gallery mostly runs on Macs rather than PCs, so they
don't need to know the ASCII codes to type the accented characters in the
first place, just simple keyboard commands).

Is there any way to either (a) turn special characters into the appropriate
ASCII codes when the form is processed, or (b) enable PostgreSQL to handle
them directly? (b) would probably be the better of the two options, if
possible...

Thanks,

Lynna
--
Resource Centre Database Coordinator
Gallery 44
www.gallery44.org