Question

Python novice here.

I am using python2.7.2 on Windows7.

I have installed the PyWin32 extensions (build 217).

I have adopdbapi installed in c:\Python27\Lib\site-packages\adodbapi

I have a very simple module that queries the AdventureWorks2008LT database in MS SQL Server.

import adodbapi

connStr='Provider=SQLOLEDB.1;' \
    'Integrated Security=SSPI;' \
    'Persist Security Info=False;' \
    'Initial Catalog=AVWKS2008LT;' \
    'Data Source=.\\SQLEXPRESS'

conn = adodbapi.connect(connStr)

tablename = "[salesLT].[Customer]"

# create a cursor
cur = conn.cursor()

# extract all the data
sql = "select * from %s" % tablename
cur.execute(sql)

# show the result
result = cur.fetchall()
for item in result:
    print item

# close the cursor and connection
cur.close()
conn.close()

The AdventureWorks2008LT sample database has customer, product, address, and order tables (etc). Some of the string data in these tables is unicode.

The query works, for the first couple rows. I see the expected output. But then, the script fails with this message:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "C:\dev\python\query-1.py", line 24, in <module>
    print item
  File "C:\Python27\lib\site-packages\adodbapi\adodbapi.py", line 651, in __str__
    return str(tuple([str(self._getValue(i)) for i in range(len(self.rows.converters))]))
UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\xe9' in position 19: ordinal not in range(128)

…which is very much not helpful. To me.

I gather that adodbapi is trying to encode a u’\xe9′ character into ASCII. I understand why that will fail.
I suppose it’s trying to do that as part of the print statement.

Why is it trying to encode the character into ASCII?
How can I tell it to just use UTF-8?

ps: I am running the script from the cmd.exe prompt in Windows. Does this mean stdout is always ASCII?

eg, \python27\python.exe -c "import sys; print(sys.stdout.encoding)"

gives me ‘cp437’

Answer 1

I was able to get the script to run to completion, printing all retrieved rows, by modifying the output portion to do this:

# show the result
result = cur.fetchall()
for item in result:
    print repr(item)

instead of this:

# show the result
result = cur.fetchall()
for item in result:
    print item

So the problem is in fact the use of str within adodbapi as Borealid said in a comment. But that is not necessarily a blocking problem. Normally when retrieving rows from a database query, people don’t simply want a string representation of a row; they want to retrieve the values in the individual columns. My conclusion is that this problem is sort of an artificial problem, due to the way I was building a test app.