Decode a string: Python

I think your issue is superficial and related to how print displays lists and list items differently. The printed output of a list is in ascii even if the items within the list are correctly encoded in utf-8. First, using chardet library:

from chardet.universaldetector import UniversalDetector

a = ['Bock', 'François Bock']

detector = UniversalDetector()
detector.feed(str(a))
detector.close()

print "Encoding for the str(list): ", detector.result

detector = UniversalDetector()
detector.feed(a[1])
detector.close()

print "Encoding for list[1]:       ", detector.result

print "The whole list:             ", a
print "Item in list:               ", a[1]

Aside from the off-putting printouts, it's possible to still write to the database with the correct encoding with a parameterized query. The last part of the below code writes to a file to confirm that the data encoding is preserved:

import sqlite3

conn = sqlite3.connect(":memory:")
conn.text_factory = str
c = conn.cursor()

c.execute("CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS testing(test1 TEXT, test2 TEXT)")
conn.commit()

my_tuple = 'Bock', 'François Bock'
table = 'testing'

placeholders = ', '.join('?' for item in my_tuple)
query = "INSERT INTO {} VALUES ({})".format(table, placeholders)

c.execute(query, my_tuple)

c.execute("SELECT * FROM testing")
all_data = c.fetchone()

# Check the printouts
print all_data
print all_data[1]

# For good measure, write them to a file
with open('check_output.txt', 'w') as outfile:
    outfile.write(', '.join(item for item in all_data))