How to achieve Cyrillic support in Python3 flask + mysql?

Question

Python

Hello. When designing the simplest web api in Python3, I ran into a problem:

• i use flash
  
• i use mariadb
  
• i do cursor.execute then cursor.fetchall
  
• i get a result tuple in which all cyrillic characters are replaced by question marks
  
• accordingly, flask.jsonify(result) also produces json with question marks
  
• with Latin and numbers everything is in order
  

Actually the question is what to do with it, and is it possible to do something at all? Or will it be easier to quickly rewrite from a beautiful Python to something more terrible, but working?

Answer 1

The solution was kindly provided in the comments by user pcdesign .
To read the required encoding from the database, the following version of the pymysql.connect() method was used:

db = pymysql.connect(host='localhost',
                             user='myuser',
                             passwd='welcome',
                             db='mydb',
                             charset='utf8')

This solved half the problem - now everything was read from the database as it should, but flask displayed Unicode characters simply by displaying their code. To solve this adversity, the following approach was taken:

app = Flask(__name__)
app.config['JSON_AS_ASCII'] = False

From that moment on, flask.jsonify started rendering Cyrillic characters as they are.

Answer 2

You should definitely start by reading the Unicode HOWTO of the Python documentation. And be sure to make sure that the base encoding is UTF-8.

Answer 3

The documentation says that you must explicitly specify the encoding. charset=utf8, example below and documentation.
# set client encoding to utf8; all strings come back as unicode
docs.sqlalchemy.org/en/latest/dialects/mysql.html#...