Web service and special characters

I am submitting information from a Flash input text field to a database via a webservice call, and am having problems sending special characters - in this case, accented letters. I have the correct character range embedded and the characters are displaying in the text field when typed, but only regular characters are coming through to the database, with the special characters omitted from the string.

I know this issue has been covered on the forum already and I have dug around for a solution to this problem, but if someone could let me know what to do in fairly straightforward terms, I would be very grateful!

I can supply more information on the methods I am using if necessary

Thanks in advance