import sqlite3 con = sqlite3.connect(":memory:")cur = con.cursor() # Create the tablecon.execute("create table person(lastname, firstname)") AUSTRIA = u"\xd6sterreich" # by default, rows are returned as Unicodecur.execute("select ?", (AUSTRIA,))row = cur.fetchone()assert row[0] == AUSTRIA # but we can make pysqlite always return bytestrings ...con.text_factory = strcur.execute("select ?", (AUSTRIA,))row = cur.fetchone()assert type(row[0]) == 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-8con.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]) == unicode # pysqlite offers a builtin optimized text_factory that will return bytestring# objects, if the data is in ASCII only, and otherwise return unicode objectscon.text_factory = sqlite3.OptimizedUnicodecur.execute("select ?", (AUSTRIA,))row = cur.fetchone()assert type(row[0]) == unicode cur.execute("select ?", ("Germany",))row = cur.fetchone()assert type(row[0]) == str