Question

I´m new to programming, but I know how to Google, so I dare to ask you for help on this one after a lot of trial and error.

I have a MySQL database (db name: text, table name: text) with utf-8 encoded text (Swedish) that I want to fetch into IPython Notebook using mysql-python (MySQLdb) for further processing.

I’ve read the python documentation about Unicode and UTF-8 (http://docs.python.org/2/howto/unicode.html), but I haven´t been able to find concrete code examples even though this must be a very trivial problem.

I just want the text in Swedish to show up in IPython Notebook with special characters åäö etc. As you can see I´ve put in more or less every code snippet I´ve found on the web regarding Unicode and UTF-8, but I can´t understand where I do the mistake(s)?

Can someone please help me out?

# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
import MySQLdb
db = MySQLdb.connect('localhost', 'user', 'password', 'text', charset='utf8', use_unicode=False)
db.set_character_set('utf8')
cursor = db.cursor()
cursor.execute('SET NAMES utf8')
cursor.execute('SET CHARACTER SET utf8')
cursor.execute('SELECT title, body FROM text LIMIT 5') 
result=cursor.fetchall()
 print result

Update: This is what I get back from the Print statement:
((‘F\xc3\xb6rsta rubriken’, ‘H\xc3\xa4r \xc3\xa4r lite text p\xc3\xa5 svenska’), (‘Andra rubriken’, ‘Ytterligare lite text p\xc3\xa5 ett annat spr\xc3\xa5k’))

Answer 1

You are printing the result of the cursor call, which is a tuple; and you are seing the Python representation of it.

If you loop through it, you’ll see your expected results:

>>> for i in result:
...    print "{} {}".format(*i)
... 
Första rubriken Här är lite text på svenska
Andra rubriken Ytterligare lite text på ett annat språk

If your output doesn’t match the above, this means your terminal doesn’t support UTF-8.