Warning raised by inserting 4-byte unicode to mysql

Question

Look at the following:

/home/kinka/workspace/py/tutorial/tutorial/pipelines.py:33: Warning: Incorrect string 
value: \'\\xF0\\x9F\\x91\\x8A\\xF0\\x9F...\' fo         


        

Answer 1

If MySQL cannot handle UTF-8 codes of 4 bytes or more then you'll have to filter out all unicode characters over codepoint \U00010000; UTF-8 encodes codepoints below that threshold in 3 bytes or fewer.

You could use a regular expression for that:

>>> import re
>>> highpoints = re.compile(u'[\U00010000-\U0010ffff]')
>>> example = u'Some example text with a sleepy face: \U0001f62a'
>>> highpoints.sub(u'', example)
u'Some example text with a sleepy face: '

Alternatively, you could use the .translate() function with a mapping table that only contains None values:

>>> nohigh = { i: None for i in xrange(0x10000, 0x110000) }
>>> example.translate(nohigh)
u'Some example text with a sleepy face: '

However, creating the translation table will eat a lot of memory and take some time to generate; it is probably not worth your effort as the regular expression approach is more efficient.

This all presumes you are using a UCS-4 compiled python. If your python was compiled with UCS-2 support then you can only use codepoints up to '\U0000ffff' in regular expressions and you'll never run into this problem in the first place.

I note that as of MySQL 5.5.3 the newly-added utf8mb4 codec does supports the full Unicode range.