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Here are some thoughts. Maybe not a response. I've been playing with python/mysql/utf-8/unicode in the past and this is the things i remember:

Looking at Saltstack mysql module's comment :

https://github.com/saltstack/salt/blob/develop/salt/modules/mysql.py#L314-L322

# MySQLdb states that this is required for charset usage
# but in fact it's more than it's internally activated
# when charset is used, activating use_unicode here would
# retrieve utf8 strings as unicode() objects in salt
# and we do not want that.
#_connarg('connection_use_unicode', 'use_unicode')
connargs['use_unicode'] = False
_connarg('connection_charset', 'charset')

We see that to avoid altering the result string the use_unicode is set to False, while the charset (which could be utf-8) is set as a parameter. use_unicode is more a 'request' to get responses as unicode strings.

You can check real usage in the tests, here: https://github.com/saltstack/salt/blob/develop/tests/integration/modules/mysql.py#L315-L365 with a database named '標準語'.

Now about the message **UnicodeEncodeError: 'utf-8' codec can't encode character '\udcd1' **. You are using unicode but you tell the module it is utf-8. It is not utf-8 until you encode your unicode string in utf-8.

Maybe you should try with:

args=(u"какой-то текст".encode('utf-8'))

At least in python3 this is required, because your "какой-то текст" is not in utf-8 by default.

Here are some thoughts. Maybe not a response. I've been playing with python/mysql/utf-8/unicode in the past and this is the things i remember:

Looking at Saltstack mysql module's comment :

https://github.com/saltstack/salt/blob/develop/salt/modules/mysql.py#L314-L322

# MySQLdb states that this is required for charset usage
# but in fact it's more than it's internally activated
# when charset is used, activating use_unicode here would
# retrieve utf8 strings as unicode() objects in salt
# and we do not want that.
#_connarg('connection_use_unicode', 'use_unicode')
connargs['use_unicode'] = False
_connarg('connection_charset', 'charset')

We see that to avoid altering the result string the use_unicode is set to False, while the charset (which could be utf-8) is set as a parameter. use_unicode is more a 'request' to get responses as unicode strings.

You can check real usage in the tests, here: https://github.com/saltstack/salt/blob/develop/tests/integration/modules/test_mysql.py#L311-L361 with a database named '標準語'.

Now about the message **UnicodeEncodeError: 'utf-8' codec can't encode character '\udcd1' **. You are using unicode but you tell the module it is utf-8. It is not utf-8 until you encode your unicode string in utf-8.

Maybe you should try with:

args=(u"какой-то текст".encode('utf-8'))

At least in python3 this is required, because your "какой-то текст" is not in utf-8 by default.