I'm developing a website using python to preprocess request and a MySQL database to store information.

All my tables are utf8 and I also use utf8 as Content-type.

I have this code to establish connection to the db:

database_connection = MySQLdb.connect(host = database_host, user = database_username, passwd = database_password, db = database_name, use_unicode = True)
cursor = database_connection.cursor()
cursor.execute("""SET NAMES utf8;""");
cursor.execute("""SET CHARACTER SET utf8;""");
cursor.execute("""SET character_set_connection=utf8;""");

Running a simple test on my GoDaddy hosting printing the results of a simple SELECT query like this:

print results.encode("utf-8")

Shows a double encoded string. (So all non-ascii characters are transformed into two different specials). But if I leave the encode statement, it gives an encoding error for each non-ascii letter.

It sounds as though results contains a Unicode string that was incorrectly decoded from a byte string coming from the database. I.e. when you read the data from the database, it decoded the byte string as Latin-1 rather than the UTF-8 it really is.

So if you fix the decoding of the database contents, then you should be in business.