Characters encoding in SQL server on AWS server

[nirbarazida]

when running the code on a local server our Char encoding default is UTF-8mb4 (that's 4 bytes)
The AWS Char encoding default is UTF-8 (that's 3 bytes) as shown in the picture.
In this case, special characters (Chinese, Russian, figures, etc.) could not be encoded Thus the program crushes.
To solve the issue we can choose 2 options:

1. change the encoding with every connection in the pymysql connection (shown in the picture)
2. create an init connection value in the AWS MySQL server.

[nirbarazida]

The solution is actually to encode the characters at the point of creating the engine as shown in the picture below

code that was added : '?charset=utf8mb4'

final code:

engine = create_engine(f"{config.SQL_EXTENSION}+{config.PYTHON_DBAPI}://{config.USER_NAME}:"
                           f"{config.PASSWORD}@localhost/{config.DB_NAME}?charset=utf8mb4")

[nirbarazida]

Although I succeeded one time to insert a user with a special string that requires UTS-8mb4 to the database - it didn't occur again.

good:

bad:

I have tried multi disciplines to solve the problem, however none have worked.
From what I've searched, this is a known problem.
I've decided to solve the problem by encoding to UTF-8 all string that Stack Exchange users can freely write.

all changes have been made in user class.
all new variables have been created in the json file and config class.

[nirbarazida]

for some users, all characters require encoding - Thus getting AttributeError.
to solve this problem used Try and except.
because the user name isn't necessary for the data Analysis we will change it to the website name + user rank

After conducting an experiment on scraping 500 users the code work fine.

[nirbarazida]

location created an issue when queering the database to check if location string excesses in Stack_Exchange_Location Table.
Thus, needed to encode the location string right after scraping it.

[nirbarazida]

This time the program crashed because of using different types of letters.
Added another 'Bandage' just to keep the server running by checking if the string is printable:

we must figure how to encode utf-8mb4 on the AWS server.
I'm am sure that the solution below will work:

green - the solution - encoding the database when creating it.
yellow - insurance - encoding specific tables and columns.

I think that you've changed the MySQL config to latin1 thus it doesn't work.