SQLAlchemy result for UTF-8 column is of type 'str', why?

Question

I have a SQL query that I execute like this with an SQLAlchemy engine:

result = engine.execute('SELECT utf_8_field FROM table') 

The database is MySQL and the column type is TEXT with UTF-8 encoding. The type of the returned utf_8_field is "str", even if I set the option convert_unicode=True when creating the engine. What happens now is that if I have a character like 'é' in my string (which is not in 7-bit ASCII, but is in the extended ASCII set), I get a UnicodeDecodeError when trying to execute this:

utf_8_field.encode("utf-8") 

The exact error is:

UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xe9 in position 1: ordinal not in range(128) 

When looking into this, I found that str.encode do not support the extended ASCII character set! I find this really strange, but that's another question.

What I don't understand is why SQLAlchemy is not giving me a unicode string. I was previously using DB-API and that was working fine. I also don't have SQLAlchemy table objects for my tables yet, that's why I'm using an execute command.

Any idea?

Answer 1

If you want the data converted automatically, you should specify the charset when you create the engine:

create_engine('mysql+mysqldb:///mydb?charset=utf8') 

Setting use_unicode alone won't tell sqlalchemy which charset to use.