PyMySQL Warning: (1366, "Incorrect string value: '\\xF0\\x9F\\x98\\x8D t...')

Question

I'm attempting to import data (tweets and other twitter text information) into a database using Pandas and MySQL. I received the following error:

166: Warning: (1366, "Incorrect string value: '\xF0\x9F\x92\x9C\xF0\x9F...' for column 'text' at row 3") result = self._query(query)

166: Warning: (1366, "Incorrect string value: '\xF0\x9F\x98\x8D t...' for column 'text' at row 5") result = self._query(query)

After a thorough search it seems as if there's something wrong in the way my database columns are set up. I've tried setting the database charset to UTF8 and collating it to utf_unicode_ci but I still receive the same error.

The following is the code that imports the data to the database:

#To create connection and write table into MySQL

engine = create_engine("mysql+pymysql://{user}:{pw}@{lh}/{db}?charset=utf8"
                       .format(user="user",
                               pw="pass",
                               db="blahDB",
                               lh="bla.com/aald/"))

df.to_sql(con=engine, name='US_tweets', if_exists='replace')

The data I'm importing consist of the following data types: 'int64', 'object' and 'datetime64[ns]'. I found out these data types by printing the data to the console with

print(df['tweett']) >>> returns dtype 'object'

I'd appreciate any help, thanks!

Answer 1

You need utf8mb4, not utf8, when connecting to MySQL and in the columns involved.

More python tips: http://mysql.rjweb.org/doc.php/charcoll#python (Except use utf8mb4 in place of utf8. UTF-8 should not be changed.)

A more detailed explanation to this can be found here.