better solution for ensuring utf-8 consistancy with

[bodepd@…]

I am no db expert, but I found that I had to change the following to get unicode characters to display and be entered correctly:

    mysql_con = MySQLdb.connect(host=_host,
                user=_user, passwd=_password, db=_db, compress=1,
                cursorclass=MySQLdb.cursors.DictCursor, use_unicode=1)

use_unicode=1 is the same as set names="utf-8", this ensures that the database data is retrieved in this format. I prob had to do this as a misconfiguration on our DB where everything is set to latin, even thougn german characters are used.