Solving Sqlite's python Unicode string problem with non UTF8 data

Error it throws:

sqlite3.ProgrammingError: You must not use 8-bit bytestrings unless you use a text_factory that can interpret 8-bit bytestrings (like text_factory = str). It is highly recommended that you instead just switch your application to Unicode strings.

Solution was easy; add this line for assigning text_factory. It converts strings into unicode objects.

conn = GetSqliteConnection(db_path) conn.text_factory = lambda x: unicode(x, 'utf-8', 'ignore')

Thanks to SO again. (PS that post is extremely useful for python encoding/decoding.)