Question

I have a python script that retrieves information from a web service and then looks up data in a MySQL db. The data is unicode when I receive it, however I want the SQL statement to use the actual character (Băcioi in the example below). As you can see, when I try and encode it to utf-8 the result is still not what I’m looking for.

>>> x = u'B\u0103cioi'
>>> x
u'B\u0103cioi'
>>> x.encode('utf-8')
'B\xc4\x83cioi'
>>> print x
Băcioi ## << What I want!

Answer 1

Your encoding is working fine. Python is simply showing you the repr()‘d version of it on the command line, which uses \x escapes. You can tell because of the fact that it’s also displaying the quotes around the string.

print does not do any mutation of the string – if it prints out the character you want, that’s what is actually in the contents of the string.