How does pyodbc determine the encoding?

Question

I'm fighting Sybase SQL Anywhere 12 together with Python (and Twisted) for several weeks by now and I even got my stuff working.

There's only one annoyance left: If I run my script on CentOS 5 with a custom Python 2.7.1, which is the deployment platform, I get my results as UTF-8.

If I run it on my Ubuntu box (Natty Narwhal) I get them in latin1.

Needless to say, that I would prefer to get all my data in Unicode but that's not the point of this question. :)

Both are 64bit boxes, both have a custom Python 2.7.1. with UCS4 and a custom built unixODBC 2.3.0.

I'm at a loss here. I can't find any documentation on that. What makes pyodbc or unixODBC behave differently on the two boxes?

Hard facts:

• Python: 2.7.1
• DB: SQL Anywhere 12
• unixODBC: 2.3.0 (2.2.14 did behave the same), self compiled with identical flags
• ODBC driver: original from Sybase.
• CentOS 5 gives me UTF-8, Ubuntu Natty Narwhal gives me latin1.

My odbc.ini looks like this:

[sybase]
Uid             = user
Pwd             = password
Driver          = /opt/sqlanywhere/lib64/libdbodbc12_r.so
Threading       = True
ServerName      = dbname
CommLinks       = tcpip(host=the-host;DoBroadcast=None)

I connect just by using DNS='sybase'.

TIA!

Answer 1

I can't tell you why it's different, but if you add "Charset=utf-8" to your DSN, you should get the results you want on both machines.

Disclaimer: I work for Sybase in SQL Anywhere engineering.