insert unicode string

[Ivan Horvath]

Dear All,

i have some problem when i try to insert in a table a unicode string.
i've made many trials without any success.

what is really strange for me, that the following code in cursors.py #144-145 gives latin1 charset back.
db = self._get_db()
charset = db.character_set_name()

if i check the charset variables with show command the system gives me utf8 charset for global and session variables as well. so, from where does come latin1?

any hint is appreciated!

this is my table:
DROP TABLE IF EXISTS `vss_history`.`unit`;
CREATE TABLE `vss_history`.`unit` (
`id` int(11) NOT NULL auto_increment,
`code` varchar(10) default NULL,
PRIMARY KEY (`id`)
) ENGINE=MyISAM DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8;

and this is my py code:
#-*- coding: utf-8 -*-
import MySQLdb

cnx = MySQLdb.connect(host="tigris.alco.hu", user="root", passwd="XXXX", db="vss_history", charset='utf8')
c = cnx.cursor()

sb = u'á'.encode('utf-8')

c.execute("insert into unit (code) values ('%s')" % sb)

this is the exception:
File "C:\Python24\Lib\site-packages\MySQLdb\cursors.py", line 146, in execute
query = query.encode(charset)
UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xc3 in position 33: ordinal not in range(128)

thank you!
Ivan