import sqlite3 con = sqlite3.connect(":memory:") cur = con.cursor() AUSTRIA = u"\xd6sterreich" # by default, rows are returned as Unicode cur.execute("select ?", (AUSTRIA,)) row = cur.fetchone() assert row[0] == AUSTRIA # but we can make sqlite3 always return bytestrings ... con.text_factory = str cur.execute("select ?", (AUSTRIA,)) row = cur.fetchone() assert type(row[0]) is str # the bytestrings will be encoded in UTF-8, unless you stored garbage in the # database ... assert row[0] == AUSTRIA.encode("utf-8") # we can also implement a custom text_factory ... # here we implement one that will ignore Unicode characters that cannot be # decoded from UTF-8 con.text_factory = lambda x: unicode(x, "utf-8", "ignore") cur.execute("select ?", ("this is latin1 and would normally create errors" + u"\xe4\xf6\xfc".encode("latin1"),)) row = cur.fetchone() assert type(row[0]) is unicode # sqlite3 offers a built-in optimized text_factory that will return bytestring # objects, if the data is in ASCII only, and otherwise return unicode objects con.text_factory = sqlite3.OptimizedUnicode cur.execute("select ?", (AUSTRIA,)) row = cur.fetchone() assert type(row[0]) is unicode cur.execute("select ?", ("Germany",)) row = cur.fetchone() assert type(row[0]) is str