How do I get SQLAlchemy to correctly insert a unicode ellipsis into a mySQL table?

Question

I am trying to parse an RSS feed with feedparser and insert it into a mySQL table using SQLAlchemy. I was actually able to get this running just fine but today the feed had

Answer 1

Adding charset=utf8 in the connection string definitely helps, but I encountered situations in Python 2.7 when adding convert_unicode=True to create_engine was also necessary. SQLAlchemy documentation says it's only to boost performance, but in my case it actually solved the problem of the wrong encoder being used.