I have a MySQL database encoded in UTF-8, but when I connect to it with SQLAlchemy (Python 2.7), I get back strings with Latin1 Unicode characters in them.
So, the Dutch spelling of Belgium (Belgiƫ) comes out as
'Belgi\xeb'
rather than
'Belgi\xc3\xab'
or, ideally the Unicode object
u'Belgi\xeb'
According to docs (http://docs.sqlalchemy.org/en/rel_0_9/core/engines.html#custom-dbapi-args):
You need to use
rather than just