Is it possible to decode strings automatically using SqlAlchemy?

Question

Using SqlAlchemy, I have some String column that fails with

UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\xe9' in position 356: ordinal not in range(128)

because they are not Unicode.

I know that by doing my_string.decode('cp1252'), it works, but is it possible to define a method that will decode all the string returned from the database automatically.

With it, calling my_model.my_string, would be processed before return and decoded.

I looked into http://docs.sqlalchemy.org/en/rel_0_8/core/types.html#coercing-encoded-strings-to-unicode, which seems to be exactly what I'm looking for, but I don't know where to tell SqlAlchemy to use the CoerceUTF8 class.

Why not have the DB-API adapter decode strings according to the connection charset? — Ignacio Vazquez-Abrams
– Ignacio Vazquez-Abrams, Commented Aug 23, 2013 at 15:44
You already found the solution. What you build there is a new type. So instead of Column(String...) or Column(Unicode...) you do Column(CoercedString...). — javex
– javex, Commented Aug 23, 2013 at 16:01
I forogt to mention that I tried to specify the UTF-8 charset in the connection string for the database, without luck. Turn out, the problem was my database encoding wasn't uft8. @Javex, post it as the answer, I'll accept it. Thanks for your comments guys :) — Cyril N.
– Cyril N., Commented Aug 25, 2013 at 19:40

javex · Accepted Answer · 2013-08-25 22:57:28Z

2

You already found the solution. What you build there is a new type. So instead of Column(String...) or Column(Unicode...) you do Column(CoercedString...).

answered Aug 25, 2013 at 22:57

javex

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