python cyrillic decode

Question

I'm trying to print cyrillic chars selected from mysql. Here is my code: content id DB is cp1251

>>> db = MySQLdb.connect(host="localhost", user="XXX", passwd="XXXX" )
>>> cursor = db.cursor()
>>> cursor.execute("""select id,title,cat,text,tags,date from db1.table1;""")
>>> test=cursor.fetchone()
>>> somevar=test[1]
>>> somevar=somevar.decode('utf8')
>>> print somevar
Result: ?????? ?? ????????

Please guide me how to print this correctly. Thx.

• summea: What does your original string look like?
• root: As @summea points out, adding an example of with a current output (before you try to decode it) would avoid us just guessing what the problem is - and improves your chances of getting a good answer.

Answer 1

This helped me (got it from here):

db = MySQLdb.connect("localhost", config.db_user, config.db_pwd, config.db_name)
# here's the magic
db.set_character_set("utf8")
dbc = db.cursor()
dbc.execute("SET NAMES utf8;")
dbc.execute("SET CHARACTER SET utf8;")
dbc.execute("SET character_set_connection=utf8;")
# and here goes your SELECT for cyrillic fields
dbc.execute("SELECT id, title, cat, text, tags, date FROM db1.table1;")
# and then you just get the results
test = dbc.fetchone()
somevar = test[1]
print somevar

Answer 2

try this:

somevar = somevar.decode('cp1251')

If that does not help, try to add charset='cp1251' parameter in MySQLdb.connect and there is use_unicode parameter, maybe you should use it to...

---

all connect parameter you can find here https://github.com/farcepest/MySQLdb1/blob/master/MySQLdb/connections.py

use_unicode

If True, text-like columns are returned as unicode objects using the connection's character set. Otherwise, text-like columns are returned as strings. columns are returned as normal strings. Unicode objects will always be encoded to the connection's character set regardless of this setting.

charset

If supplied, the connection character set will be changed to this character set (MySQL-4.1 and newer). This implies use_unicode=True.

• user2262678: Hi, thanks for you answer, I tried decode('cp1251'), decode('utf8'), decode('utf-8'), encode('cp1251'), encode('utf8'), encode('utf-8') but without success :( any other ideas ?
• user2262678: database charset is utf, but table charset is cp1251