console characters/keyboard

[Aaron Peterson]

I have been working with a database recently that contained values
with special characters.  A lower case "n" with a tilde over it for
instance.  Anyway, during the conversion of the database from mysql to
sqlite these special characters got corrupted.  I ended up fixing them
by hand since there weren't many, but during the process I realized
these things:

1) My console does not print these characters, but empty box characters instead

2) I have no good way of entering these characters (that I know of)
with my standard keyboard layout and language settings.

So the obvious questions follow:

1) Can I somehow alter my console or add fonts so these characters are
displayed properly

2) I ended up writing a perl program and giving it html entities to
decode back to the special character and insert into the database, but
this is very roundabout.  How can I set my FreeBSD box up to be able
to enter such characters manually?

Thanks in advance for any assistance,
Aaron