pyMySQL set connection character set

Question

I'm developing a fairly straightforward web app using Flask and MySQL.

I'm struggling with unicode. Users sometimes paste stuff that they copied from Word and it's falling over with the old smart quotes u'\u201c'.

A little bit of investigation shows that the connection I have to MySQL is using the Latin1 charset (seems to be the default).

How can I specify for it to use unicode for its connection?

I'm using pyMySQL, which purports to be a drop-in replacement for MySQLdb. MySQLdb defines a set_character_set(self, charset) function for connection objects, but pyMySQL doesn't (I get an error if I try).

Answer 1

I worked it out by poking around in the pyMySQL source (I had tried, but couldn't find the right place!).

You can specify it when you create the connection:

conn = pymysql.connect(host='localhost',
                       user='username',
                       passwd='password',
                       db='database',
                       charset='utf8')

Solved my problem.