MySQL-Python character encoding exception on db insert

Question

I am getting the following Exception when trying to save a row to a db:

Unexpected error: (<type 'exceptions.UnicodeEncodeError'>, UnicodeEncodeError('latin-1', u"First 'A\u043a' Last", 7, 8, 'ordinal not in range(256)'), <traceback object at 0x106562908>)

Before inserting, I am converting every string in a dictionary to latin-1 like this:

for k,v in row.items():
    if type(v) is str:
        row[k] = v.decode('utf-8').encode('latin-1')

The offending character seems to be 'A\u043a' - in other cases there seem to be other characters also "not within range."

Help appreciated.

Answer 1

Solved. The problem was attempting to decode a string which was already UTF-8. I also added 'ignore' to the encode() arguments,

v.encode('latin-1', 'ignore')

This ensures any non-encodable characters are replaced with a '?'