Notes from a Messy Desk

OK, I think I can debunk the real hack (that you can append UNICODE=1 to the connection string to set the MySQL connection to Unicode) after poking around in the source a little. This is the code in question which parses the connection string, from db.py:
[code lang="python"] def _parse_connection_string(self, connection):
kwargs = {'conv': self.conv}
items = split(connection)
self._use_TM = None
if not items: return kwargs
lockreq, items = items[0], items[1:]
if lockreq[0] == "*":
self._mysql_lock = lockreq[1:]
db_host, items = items[0], items[1:]
self._use_TM = 1
else:
self._mysql_lock = None
db_host = lockreq
if '@' in db_host:
db, host = split(db_host,'@',1)
kwargs['db'] = db
if ':' in host:
host, port = split(host,':',1)
kwargs['port'] = int(port)
kwargs['host'] = host
else:
kwargs['db'] = db_host
if kwargs['db'] and kwargs['db'][0] in ('+', '-'):
self._try_transactions = kwargs['db'][0]
kwargs['db'] = kwargs['db'][1:]
else:
self._try_transactions = None
if not kwargs['db']:
del kwargs['db']
if not items: return kwargs
kwargs['user'], items = items[0], items[1:]
if not items: return kwargs
kwargs['passwd'], items = items[0], items[1:]
if not items: return kwargs
kwargs['unix_socket'], items = items[0], items[1:]
return kwargs[/code]

which does everything it's documented to do (allows you to specify the database, host & port, whether transactions should be enabled, credentials and a path to the Unix socket), but nothing more. No Unicode enabling hacks, nothing.

So that answers that. Looks like the only solution is to set the default encoding globally in sitecustomise.py. Unfortunately, one can't set the default encoding anywhere else, since one of the last things that site.py does is to delete sys.setdefaultencoding() so that, once the Python interpreter is initialised, the encoding is fixed for the duration. (I guess there's a very good reason for this.)

Bother. I don't like that we have to make changes outside our application's domain. But for email, you need Unicode. Think of all that foreign character set spam you get -- at least MailManager will render it beautifully!