In python, I compressed a string using zlib, and then inserted it into a mysql column that is of type blob, using the utf-8 encoding. The string comes back as utf-8, but it's not clear how to get it back into a format where I can decompress it. Here is some pseduo-output:

valueInserted = zlib.compress('a') = 'x\x9cK\x04\x00\x00b\x00b'

valueFromSqlColumn = u'x\x9cK\x04\x00\x00b\x00b'

zlib.decompress(valueFromSqlColumn) UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\x9c' in position 1: ordinal not in range(128)

if i do this, it inserts some extra characters:

valueFromSqlColumn.encode('utf-8') = 'x\xc2\x9cK\x04\x00\x00b\x00b'

Any suggestions?

Unicode is designed to be compatible with latin-1, so try:

>>> import zlib
>>> u = zlib.compress("test").decode('latin1')
>>> u
u'x\x9c+I-.\x01\x00\x04]\x01\xc1'

And then

>>> zlib.decompress(u.encode('latin1'))
'test'

EDIT: Fixed typo, latin-1 isn't designed to be compatible with unicode, it's the other way around.