Python MySQL Unicode Error

I am trying to insert a query that contains é - or \xe9 (INSERT INTO tbl1 (text) VALUES ("fiancé")) into开发者_StackOverflow中文版 a MySQL table in Python using the _mysql module.

My query is in unicode, and when I call _mysql.connect(...).query(query) I get a UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\xe9' in position X : ordinal not in range(128).

Obviously the call to query causes a conversion of the unicode string to ASCII somehow, but the question is why? My DB is in utf8 and the connection is opened with the flags use_unicode=True and charset='utf8'. Is unicode simply not supported with _mysql or MySQLdb? Am I missing something else?

Thanks!

I know this doesn't directly answer your question, but why aren't you using prepared statements? That will do two things: probably fix your problem, and almost certainly fix the SQLi bug you've almost certainly got.

If you won't do that, are you absolutely certain your string itself is unicode? If you're just naively using strings in python 2.7, it probably is being forced into an ASCII string.