SQLAlchemy automatically converts str to unicode on commit
- by Victor Stanciu
Hello,
When inserting an object into a database with SQLAlchemy, all it's properties that correspond to String() columns are automatically transformed from <type 'str'> to <type 'unicode'>. Is there a way to prevent this behavior?
Here is the code:
from sqlalchemy import create_engine, Table, Column, Integer, String, MetaData
from sqlalchemy.orm import mapper, sessionmaker
engine = create_engine('sqlite:///:memory:', echo=False)
metadata = MetaData()
table = Table('projects', metadata,
Column('id', Integer, primary_key=True),
Column('name', String(50))
)
class Project(object):
def __init__(self, name):
self.name = name
mapper(Project, table)
metadata.create_all(engine)
session = sessionmaker(bind=engine)()
project = Project("Lorem ipsum")
print(type(project.name))
session.add(project)
session.commit()
print(type(project.name))
And here is the output:
<type 'str'>
<type 'unicode'>
I know I should probably just work with unicode, but this would involve digging through some third-party code and I don't have the Python skills for that yet :)
