Some days ago a friend of mine who is learning python asked for my help. He was experimenting issues with spanish special characters (such as tildes -á,é,í,ó,ú- and -ñ-) when retrieving data from a MySQL database.
When I looked at the code, I saw he was connecting to MySQL using MySQLdb connect function as in:
import MySQLdb as mdb con = mdb.connect(host='localhost',user='myuser',passwd='mypassword',db='mydatabase') |
And he was astonished because I was able to solve his problems just by changing that to:
import MySQLdb as mdb con = mdb.connect(host='localhost',user='myuser',passwd='mypassword',db='mydatabase', charset='utf8', use_unicode=False) |
So don’t underestimate the power of official documentation and please, RTFM!