ascii god damn it

So tonight I ran into an issue that at first i thought would have been easy to rectify, but after 2 hours of trying to I ended up going with the obvious option of removing the problem. I had added a new actor to the list of people who can be tagged with films but this German Actor had a ü in his name. Ok so not much of an issue as I changed it to a special character, or should i say my code automatically did this and I didn't think anything more about it.

But seeing as I use these peoples names as urls this posed an issue I had not thought about. so when i tested this actor to see what he had been tagged with i got an error page. Basically from what I had been reading up on after urls have to be ascii and that wasn't hence it all mucking up. I tried unsuccessfully for a couple of hours to find a solution to this issue that woudl work without changing the letter in the database but nothing was working. So my short term solution is to change that letter to a u in the DB and it will work, but long term I want to find a solution that will work with the proper character in there.