Question

I want to sanitise a UTF-8 encoded string before using it as part of a MySQL SELECT statement.

For example, I have:

query = MySQLdb.escape_string(query)

but this line is leading to a raised exception that reads

‘ascii’ codec can’t encode characters in position 0-2: ordinal not in
range(128).

How can I handle this?

Answer 1

Looks like MySQLdb is trying to encode your unicode query to a string. To do so it’s using the default encoding: ASCII.

Now, your input can’t be encoded into ASCII, so you just need to tell python what encoding it should use: utf-8.

You can achieve this by using query = query.encode('utf-8').