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Python with MySql unicode problems

I need to call MySQL stored procedure from my python script. As one of parameters I'm passing a unicode string (Russian language), but I get an error;

UnicodeEncodeError: 'latin-1' codec can't encode characters in position 0-1: ordinal not in range(256)

My script:

 self.db=MySQLdb.connect("localhost", "usr", "pass", "dbName")
 self.cursor=self.db.cursor()
 args=("какой-то текст") #this is string in russian
 self.cursor.callproc('pr_MyProc', args)
 self.cursor.execute('SELECT @_pr_MyProc_2') #getting result from sp
 result=self.cursor.fetchone()
 self.db.commit()

I've read that setting charset='utf8' shuld resolve this problem, but when I use string:

self.db=MySQLdb.connect("localhost", "usr", "pass", "dbName", charset='utf8')

This gives me another error;

UnicodeEncodeError: 'utf-8' codec can't encode character '\udcd1' in position 20: surrogates not allowed

Also I've trying to set parametr use_unicode=True, that's not working.

Answer*

I encountered a similar issue, which was caused by invalid utf-8 data in the database; it seems that MySQL doesn't care about that, but Python does, because it's following the UTF-8 spec, which says [that](http://unicode.org/faq/utf_bom.html#utf8-4):

- surrogate pairs are not allowed in utf-8
- unpaired surrogates are not allowed in utf-8

If you want to "make it work", you'll have to intercept the MySQL packet and use your own converter which will perform ad-hoc replacements.

Here's one way to "handle" invalid data containing surrogates:

 def borked_utf8_decode(data):
 """
 Work around input with unpaired surrogates or surrogate pairs,
 replacing by XML char refs: look for "&#\d+;" after.
 """
 return data.decode("utf-8", "surrogatepass") \
 .encode("utf-8", "xmlcharrefreplace") \
 .decode("utf-8")

Note that the proper way to handle that is context-dependent, but there are some common replacement scenarios, like [this one](https://github.com/jagracey/Awesome-Unicode#calculating-surrogate-pairs).

And here's one way of plugging this into `pymysql` (another way is to monkey-patch field processing, see eg. https://github.com/PyMySQL/PyMySQL/issues/631):

 import pymysql.converters

 # use this in your connection
 pymysql_use_unicode = False
 conversions = pymysql.converters.conversions
 conversions[pymysql.converters.FIELD_TYPE.STRING] = borked_utf8_decode
 conversions[pymysql.converters.FIELD_TYPE.VAR_STRING] = borked_utf8_decode
 conversions[pymysql.converters.FIELD_TYPE.VARCHAR] = borked_utf8_decode

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Python with MySql unicode problems

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