Trouble with utf-8 values

[Peter Otten]

Ulrich Goebel wrote:

> Hallo,
> 
> again: a python beginner problem... but I spent ours to solve it without
> success.
> 
> I have an object (a variable) name, which gets its value from a
> PostgreSQL database via a SELECT statement, an it sometimes has german
> special characters as ß, ä, ö...
> 
> Then I would like to insert that value into a table in a SQLite
> database. So I make a cursor cur on the table and prepare a SQL
> statement like this:
> 
> sql = 'insert into tbl values(?)'
> cur.execute(sql, (name,))
> 
> That ends up with the exception, for example,
> 
> UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xc3 in position 6:
> ordinal not in range(128)
> 
> The "position 6" is exactly the position of the special character, ß in
> this case.
> 
> What to do?

While sqlite works with unicode out of the box it looks like the PostgreSQL 
adapter needs to be convinced first:

http://initd.org/psycopg/docs/usage.html#unicode-handling

Try adding the voodoo suggested above

import psycopg2
import psycopg2.extensions
psycopg2.extensions.register_type(psycopg2.extensions.UNICODE)
psycopg2.extensions.register_type(psycopg2.extensions.UNICODEARRAY)

to your script. I'm of course assuming you are using python 2.x and 
pyscopg2...