"'utf-8' codec can't decode byte" when querying string in MySQL

Asked Jul 06 '19 at 06:05

Active Dec 29 '19 at 21:56

Viewed 841 times

I'm querying to see if a particular URL exists in my table:

query = 'SELECT EXISTS(SELECT * FROM table WHERE LINK = %s)'
c.execute(query, [link])
result = c.fetchall()[0][0]

If I set link equal to "https://www.reuters.com/article/us-mideast-iran-tanker/iran-threatens-british-shipping-in-retaliation-for-tanker-seizure-idUSKCN1U00S5", it works fine. But when I specifically try:

query = 'SELECT EXISTS(SELECT * FROM table WHERE LINK = %s)'
c.execute(query, ["
https://www.reuters.com/article/brief-katanga-mining-receives-confirmati/brief-katanga-mining-receives-confirmation-from-kamoto-copper-co-that-armed-forces-of-drc-are-in-area-around-operations-of-kcc-idUSFWN24502R"])

I get:

UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf-8' codec can't decode byte 0xff in position 1: invalid start byte

This happened for another long URL. But the column type is mediumtext, and it's the same type I'm using for much longer strings.

edited Dec 29 '19 at 21:56

marc_s

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asked Jul 06 '19 at 06:05

snapcrack

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Looks like your codec is choking on the byte order mark, but I’m not really sure what to do about it.. – Caius Jard Jul 06 '19 at 06:19
`SELECT LEFT(HEX(link), 10) ...` would show the FF and make it obvious if there is a BOM. – Rick James Jul 13 '19 at 18:32
@RickJames the problem is I can't actually get these strings into the database so I can't select them – snapcrack Jul 14 '19 at 02:49
Then see if you can get the HEX from python. – Rick James Jul 14 '19 at 04:00
@RickJames hex for the first 10 characters is `68:74:74:70:73:3a:2f:2f:77:77` – snapcrack Jul 14 '19 at 04:54
Hmmm... No [_BOM_](http://mysql.rjweb.org/doc.php/charcoll#bom_byte_order_mark) there. – Rick James Jul 14 '19 at 17:43
Do you have this at the beginning of your code? `# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-` ? – Rick James Jul 14 '19 at 17:46
See also http://mysql.rjweb.org/doc.php/charcoll#python – Rick James Jul 14 '19 at 17:52
And https://stackoverflow.com/search?tab=newest&q=codec%20decode%20byte – Rick James Jul 14 '19 at 17:53
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I got the same error and fixed it by renaming a column (column that was a subquery, therefore it had a strange default name) – Alexandre Campos May 03 '21 at 11:37

"'utf-8' codec can't decode byte" when querying string in MySQL

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