Question

I’m trying to pull out a list of table names from a MySQL database. The pertinent parts of the code are as follows:

conn = pyodbc.connect('...')
cursor = conn.cursor()
for table in cursor.tables():
    print table.table_name

For every table it prints a bunch of gibberish characters (boxes and question marks in diamonds). Using repr(table.table_name) it prints:

u'\U00500041\U004c0050\U00430049\U00540041\U004f0049'

for the table named “APPLICATION”.

If you treat each 32 bit character as two 16 bit characters you get the string “PALPCITAOI”. Swapping pairs of characters (1 and 2, 3 and 4, etc.) it produces “APPLICATIO” (missing the “N”). Presumably, it swapped N and the null character, resulting in the missing N (assuming null-terminated strings).

How can I get the table names out properly?

This is running under Python 2.4, PyODBC 2.1, and MySQL 5.0.22.

Answer 1

Adding CHARSET=UTF8 to the connection string worked and I now have the application up and running. For example:

change

cnxn = pyodbc.connect('DSN=localhost')

to

cnxn = pyodbc.connect('DSN=localhost;CHARSET=UTF8')

Thank you Thomas for pointing me in the right direction. Upgrading to a later version of PyODBC may also work.