I am having troubles with some unicode utf8 characters. They are not displayed properly.
I was trying a lot off different settings  on the connection part of the SQLObject scrpit (see below), but not success till now.

============== this code DOES NOT bring the UTF -8 code from the database   ==============
from sqlobject import *
mport MySQLdb.converters

def _mysql_timestamp_converter(raw):
         """Convert a MySQL TIMESTAMP to a floating point number representing
         the seconds since the Un*x Epoch. It uses custom code the input seems
         to be the new (MySQL 4.1+) timestamp format, otherwise code from the
         MySQLdb module is used."""
         if raw[4] == '-':
             return time.mktime(time.strptime(raw, '%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S'))
         else:
             return MySQLdb.converters.mysql_timestamp_converter(raw)

conversions = MySQLdb.converters.conversions.copy()
conversions[MySQLdb.constants.FIELD_TYPE.TIMESTAMP] = _mysql_timestamp_converter

MySQLConnection = mysql.builder()
connection = connectionForURI("mysql://prestashop:prestashop <at> 127.0.0.1:3306/prestashop")
=============================================================================

Finaly I did try the direct use of the MySQLdb and it worsk OK! But I can not see why!!!

============== this code brings the UTF-8 code from the database   ==============

import MySQLdb

conn = MySQLdb.connect (host = "localhost",
                        user = "prestashop",
                        passwd = "prestashop",
                        db = "prestashop",                                                
                        use_unicode = True,
                        charset = "utf8")

cursor = conn.cursor ()
cursor.execute ('SELECT * FROM prestashop.ps_address')


Thanks for your comments

Petr Jakeš