[patch] database charset and mysql backend

[little]

This is moved over from #1355:

2. In django.core.db.backends.mysql.DatabaseWrapper in method cursor()

When you doing

            self.connection = Database.connect(**kwargs)
        cursor = self.connection.cursor()
        if self.connection.get_server_info() >= '4.1':
            cursor.execute("SET NAMES 'utf8'")

After 'set names ..' the charset of connection was changed.
But self.connection.charset property (property of MySQLdb.connection) was not changed. It is always 'Latin1'
So, when i pass u"unicode national characters" into database, MySQLdb tryed to convert it into Latin1 and exception raises

To fix it, i must set .charset propery manually:

...
            self.connection = Database.connect(**kwargs)
            self.connection.charset = 'utf8'
        cursor = self.connection.cursor()
        if self.connection.get_server_info() >= '4.1':
            cursor.execute("SET NAMES 'utf8'")
...

[Philipp Keller <philipp.keller@…>]

I ran into the same problem as reported in this ticket.
My posted diff is slightly different than the proposed change. The diff is really small and really shouldn't cause any problems.

[Simon G. <dev@…>]

I've checked and this doesn't appear to conflict with #3151 ([4267]).

[anton@…]

Guys, please take a look at #3370
this line:

self.connection.charset = 'utf8'

does not work in my environment (MySQL 5.0), and it only works when I pass 'charset': 'utf8' to kwargs when doing:

self.connection = Database.connect(**kwargs)

[Michael Radziej <mir@…>]

We have a bit of chaos here ... Tickets #3370, #1356 and probably #952 all are about this problem, all are accepted, and #3370 and #1356 have very similar patches. I ask everybody to continue discussion in django-developers ("unicode issues in multiple tickets"), and I ask the authors of these three tickets to work together to find out how to proceed.

As long as it's not clear which path to take, I mark all bugs as "design decision needed." (I assume that the other reviews were not aware of the competing tickets.)

​http://groups.google.com/group/django-developers/browse_thread/thread/4b71be8257d42faf

[Malcolm Tredinnick]

I wouldn't be too surprised to discover that #2635 fixes this particular problem and some of the others.

[Michael Radziej <mir@…>]

duplicate of #3754 (and fixed). It's still a bug for mysql_old, but mysql_old is deprecated.