Write cyrillic letters into mysql with python

Question

I have script that parse data from txt file(I think its utf8) and then it should write it to mysql. When I do something like that:

cur.execute("insert into keywords (keyword) values ('%s')" % (u'RUSSIAN TEXT HERE'))

it do the job well(I have russian string in my mysqldb), but when I

f = open('/Users/aaaa/Desktop/keywords.txt', 'rw+')
for x in range (14028):
 a = f.readline(x)
 cur.execute("insert into keywords (keyword) values ('%s')" % (a))
 #or that
 cur.execute("insert into keywords (keyword) values ('%s')" % (unicode(a)))

then I get this

'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xd0 in position 0: ordinal not in range(128)

I have this in my mysql

character_set_client utf8
character_set_connection utf8
character_set_database utf8
character_set_filesystem binary
character_set_results utf8
character_set_server latin1
character_set_system utf8
character_sets_dir /usr/local/mysql-5.6.20-osx10.8-x86_64/share/charsets/

Occasionally, I wrote simbols into database, but russian symbols was like squares and stuff.
What should I do?

Also, I get this after repr(a)

''
'0'
'5 '
'ru '
'\xd0\xbc\xd0\xb0'
'\xd1\x85\xd0\xb0\xd1'
Traceback (most recent call last):

• ThiefMaster: NEVER use the % operator to parametrize SQL queries. While using %s is correct, you have to pass the actual data tuple as another argument to cur.execute() - otherwise you perform string interpolation which leaves you open to sql injection.
• alex: ok thanks. But what should I do, to write data into mysql?
• Joran Beasley: print repr(a) and post what it is when you crash

Answer 1

Try to open file this way:

f = open('/Users/aaaa/Desktop/keywords.txt', 'rw+', encoding='utf-8')

• alex: f = codecs.open('/Users/alexeypolusov/Desktop/keywords.txt', encoding='utf-8', mode='rw+') here it is! THANKS DUDE