Proper Way to Insert Strings to a SQLAlchemy Unicode Column

Question

I have a SQLAlchemy model with a Unicode column. I sometimes insert unicode values to it (u'Value'), but also sometimes insert ASCII strings. What is the best way to go about this? When I insert ASCII strings with special characters I get this warning:

SAWarning: Unicode type received non-unicode bind param value ...

How do I avoid this? What is the proper way to insert my different types of strings?

Answer 1

Thre are several options:

1. Disable all SQLAlchemy warnings with warnings.simplefilter('ignore', sqlalchemy.exc.SAWarning).
2. Disable only this warning with more specific filter spec by module and lineno or message, e.g. warnings.filterwarnings('ignore', '^Unicode type received non-unicode bind param value', sqlalchemy.exc.SAWarning).
3. Use String(convert_unicode=True) instead of Unicode type.
4. Rethink the problem and change your code to use unicode even for ASCII strings.