Thanks all for the replies, I think it cleared my mind of some confusion.

Just tried to do as you guys suggested: keeping track on bytes or chars, using utf-8 in my source. And voila, things got kinda simple. Told the backend (graph) to expect utf-8 and was just able to send the scalar (containing utf-8 chars). No further encoding or decoding needed

Guess I will have to make sure when I actually download information from the school information system that it is in fact utf-8 chars.

Back to assigning groups and other properties to our students.... thank!

Peter