Django + MySQL - Unknown encoding: utf8mb4

Question

MySQL 5.5.35 Django 1.6.1

In order to support emoticons in the DB, I have configured in my django settings:

'OPTIONS': {'charset': 'utf8mb4'}

On MySQL connection, I get this error: LookupError: unknown encoding: utf8mb4

How should I configure Django/MySQL in order to support utf8mb4?

Answer 1

https://code.djangoproject.com/ticket/18392#comment:10

As a workaround, you can make python understand 'utf8mb4' as an alias for 'utf8':

import codecs
codecs.register(lambda name: codecs.lookup('utf8') if name == 'utf8mb4' else None)

Answer 2

If you really need utf8mb4, follow the steps in https://mathiasbynens.be/notes/mysql-utf8mb4, and make sure your python package "MySQL-python" version is >= 1.2.5 !