storing and working with accented characters (high ascii)

I have a person table, and some of the records have accented characters,
such as accent-e. My trigger is choking on the character with the error
message "ERROR: invalid byte sequence for encoding "UNICODE": 0xe2b365".
If I edit the field to remove that accented e, no problem. What is the
proper way to handle this? I read on google references to utf encoding
etc., but they were not complete explanations and I'm still confused. It
seems I need to use the convert command, but I haven't found an useful
example. Anyone have one? How does this impact ORDER BY commands, for
example? And if I'm outputting this data to an RTF file, how does that work
with Mac OS vs. Windows for example, where the ascii codes are different
for the same accented e (following my example). Any insights or helpful
links are appreciated.

As always, thanks.

Diana Nemirovsky
Marin Consulting, Inc.
770 Menlo Ave, Ste 223
Menlo Park, CA 94025
v (650) 617-8699
f (650) 833-0790
http://www.marinconsulting.com