In case you want to store special characters inside of MySQL table field, you need to change the table encoding like below:

ALTER TABLE YOUR_TABLE CONVERT TO CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_unicode_ci;

#database #mysql #charset #character_set #collate #utf8 #utf8_unicode_ci #alter

If you are working in docker and have utf8 problems like UnicodeDecodeError exceptions. And you are scratching your head like me and encode & decode does no good for the problem, use setdefaultencoding:

import sys
 reload(sys)
 sys.setdefaultencoding("utf-8")

NOTE: it is discouraged to use the above function. As I have mentioned docker which its OS is isolated, I aware of what I'm doing. In case you are in doubt DO NOT USE IT specially on host OS!

#python #encoding #utf8 #encode #decode