I started by trying to store strings in sqlite using python, and got the message:

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.

Ok, I switched to Unicode strings. Then I started getting the message:

sqlite3.OperationalError: Could not decode to UTF-8 column 'tag_artist' with text 'Sigur Rós'

when trying to retrieve data from the db. More research and I started encoding it in utf8, but then 'Sigur Rós' starts looking like 'Sigur Rós'

note: My console was set to display in 'latin_1' as @John Machin pointed out.

What gives? After reading this, describing exactly the same situation I'm in, it seems as if the advice is to ignore the other advice and use 8-bit bytestrings after all.

I didn't know much about unicode and utf before I started this process. I've learned quite a bit in the last couple hours, but I'm still ignorant of whether there is a way to correctly convert 'ó' from latin-1 to utf-8 and not mangle it. If there isn't, why would sqlite 'highly recommend' I switch my application to unicode strings?

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I'm going to update this question with a summary and some example code of everything I've learned in the last 24 hours so that someone in my shoes can have an easy(er) guide. If the information I post is wrong or misleading in any way please tell me and I'll update, or one of you senior guys can update.

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Summary of answers

Let me first state the goal as I understand it. The goal in processing various encodings, if you are trying to convert between them, is to understand what your source encoding is, then convert it to unicode using that source encoding, then convert it to your desired encoding. Unicode is a base and encodings are mappings of subsets of that base. utf_8 has room for every character in unicode, but because they aren't in the same place as, for instance, latin_1, a string encoded in utf_8 and sent to a latin_1 console will not look the way you expect. In python the process of getting to unicode and into another encoding looks like:

str.decode('source_encoding').encode('desired_encoding')

or if the str is already in unicode

str.encode('desired_encoding')

For sqlite I didn't actually want to encode it again, I wanted to decode it and leave it in unicode format. Here are four things you might need to be aware of as you try to work with unicode and encodings in python.

1. The encoding of the string you want to work with, and the encoding you want to get it to.
2. The system encoding.
3. The console encoding.
4. The encoding of the source file

Elaboration:

(1) When you read a string from a source, it must have some encoding, like latin_1 or utf_8. In my case, I'm getting strings from filenames, so unfortunately, I could be getting any kind of encoding. Windows XP uses UCS-2 (a Unicode system) as its native string type, which seems like cheating to me. Fortunately for me, the characters in most filenames are not going to be made up of more than one source encoding type, and I think all of mine were either completely latin_1, completely utf_8, or just plain ascii (which is a subset of both of those). So I just read them and decoded them as if they were still in latin_1 or utf_8. It's possible, though, that you could have latin_1 and utf_8 and whatever other characters mixed together in a filename on Windows. Sometimes those characters can show up as boxes, other times they just look mangled, and other times they look correct (accented characters and whatnot). Moving on.

(2) Python has a default system encoding that gets set when python starts and can't be changed during runtime. See here for details. Dirty summary ... well here's the file I added:

\# sitecustomize.py  
\# this file can be anywhere in your Python path,  
\# but it usually goes in ${pythondir}/lib/site-packages/  
import sys  
sys.setdefaultencoding('utf_8')  

This system encoding is the one that gets used when you use the unicode("str") function without any other encoding parameters. To say that another way, python tries to decode "str" to unicode based on the default system encoding.

(3) If you're using IDLE or the command-line python, I think that your console will display according to the default system encoding. I am using pydev with eclipse for some reason, so I had to go into my project settings, edit the launch configuration properties of my test script, go to the Common tab, and change the console from latin-1 to utf-8 so that I could visually confirm what I was doing was working.

(4) If you want to have some test strings, eg

test_str = "ó"

in your source code, then you will have to tell python what kind of encoding you are using in that file. (FYI: when I mistyped an encoding I had to ctrl-Z because my file became unreadable.) This is easily accomplished by putting a line like so at the top of your source code file:

# -*- coding: utf_8 -*-

If you don't have this information, python attempts to parse your code as ascii by default, and so:

SyntaxError: Non-ASCII character '\xf3' in file _redacted_ on line 81, but no encoding declared; see http://www.python.org/peps/pep-0263.html for details

Once your program is working correctly, or, if you aren't using python's console or any other console to look at output, then you will probably really only care about #1 on the list. System default and console encoding are not that important unless you need to look at output and/or you are using the builtin unicode() function (without any encoding parameters) instead of the string.decode() function. I wrote a demo function I will paste into the bottom of this gigantic mess that I hope correctly demonstrates the items in my list. Here is some of the output when I run the character 'ó' through the demo function, showing how various methods react to the character as input. My system encoding and console output are both set to utf_8 for this run:

'?' = original char <type 'str'> repr(char)='\xf3'
'?' = unicode(char) ERROR: 'utf8' codec can't decode byte 0xf3 in position 0: unexpected end of data
'ó' = char.decode('latin_1') <type 'unicode'> repr(char.decode('latin_1'))=u'\xf3'
'?' = char.decode('utf_8')  ERROR: 'utf8' codec can't decode byte 0xf3 in position 0: unexpected end of data

Now I will change the system and console encoding to latin_1, and I get this output for the same input:

'ó' = original char <type 'str'> repr(char)='\xf3'
'ó' = unicode(char) <type 'unicode'> repr(unicode(char))=u'\xf3'
'ó' = char.decode('latin_1') <type 'unicode'> repr(char.decode('latin_1'))=u'\xf3'
'?' = char.decode('utf_8')  ERROR: 'utf8' codec can't decode byte 0xf3 in position 0: unexpected end of data

Notice that the 'original' character displays correctly and the builtin unicode() function works now.

Now I change my console output back to utf_8.

'?' = original char <type 'str'> repr(char)='\xf3'
'?' = unicode(char) <type 'unicode'> repr(unicode(char))=u'\xf3'
'?' = char.decode('latin_1') <type 'unicode'> repr(char.decode('latin_1'))=u'\xf3'
'?' = char.decode('utf_8')  ERROR: 'utf8' codec can't decode byte 0xf3 in position 0: unexpected end of data

Here everything still works the same as last time but the console can't display the output correctly. Etc. The function below also displays more information that this and hopefully would help someone figure out where the gap in their understanding is. I know all this information is in other places and more thoroughly dealt with there, but I hope that this would be a good kickoff point for someone trying to get coding with python and/or sqlite. Ideas are great but sometimes source code can save you a day or two of trying to figure out what functions do what.

Disclaimers: I'm no encoding expert, I put this together to help my own understanding. I kept building on it when I should have probably started passing functions as arguments to avoid so much redundant code, so if I can I'll make it more concise. Also, utf_8 and latin_1 are by no means the only encoding schemes, they are just the two I was playing around with because I think they handle everything I need. Add your own encoding schemes to the demo function and test your own input.

One more thing: there are apparently crazy application developers making life difficult in Windows.

#!/usr/bin/env python
# -*- coding: utf_8 -*-

import os
import sys

def encodingDemo(str):
    validStrings = ()
    try:        
        print "str =",str,"{0} repr(str) = {1}".format(type(str), repr(str))
        validStrings += ((str,""),)
    except UnicodeEncodeError as ude:
        print "Couldn't print the str itself because the console is set to an encoding that doesn't understand some character in the string.  See error:\n\t",
        print ude
    try:
        x = unicode(str)
        print "unicode(str) = ",x
        validStrings+= ((x, " decoded into unicode by the default system encoding"),)
    except UnicodeDecodeError as ude:
        print "ERROR.  unicode(str) couldn't decode the string because the system encoding is set to an encoding that doesn't understand some character in the string."
        print "\tThe system encoding is set to {0}.  See error:\n\t".format(sys.getdefaultencoding()),  
        print ude
    except UnicodeEncodeError as uee:
        print "ERROR.  Couldn't print the unicode(str) because the console is set to an encoding that doesn't understand some character in the string.  See error:\n\t",
        print uee
    try:
        x = str.decode('latin_1')
        print "str.decode('latin_1') =",x
        validStrings+= ((x, " decoded with latin_1 into unicode"),)
        try:        
            print "str.decode('latin_1').encode('utf_8') =",str.decode('latin_1').encode('utf_8')
            validStrings+= ((x, " decoded with latin_1 into unicode and encoded into utf_8"),)
        except UnicodeDecodeError as ude:
            print "The string was decoded into unicode using the latin_1 encoding, but couldn't be encoded into utf_8.  See error:\n\t",
            print ude
    except UnicodeDecodeError as ude:
        print "Something didn't work, probably because the string wasn't latin_1 encoded.  See error:\n\t",
        print ude
    except UnicodeEncodeError as uee:
        print "ERROR.  Couldn't print the str.decode('latin_1') because the console is set to an encoding that doesn't understand some character in the string.  See error:\n\t",
        print uee
    try:
        x = str.decode('utf_8')
        print "str.decode('utf_8') =",x
        validStrings+= ((x, " decoded with utf_8 into unicode"),)
        try:        
            print "str.decode('utf_8').encode('latin_1') =",str.decode('utf_8').encode('latin_1')
        except UnicodeDecodeError as ude:
            print "str.decode('utf_8').encode('latin_1') didn't work.  The string was decoded into unicode using the utf_8 encoding, but couldn't be encoded into latin_1.  See error:\n\t",
            validStrings+= ((x, " decoded with utf_8 into unicode and encoded into latin_1"),)
            print ude
    except UnicodeDecodeError as ude:
        print "str.decode('utf_8') didn't work, probably because the string wasn't utf_8 encoded.  See error:\n\t",
        print ude
    except UnicodeEncodeError as uee:
        print "ERROR.  Couldn't print the str.decode('utf_8') because the console is set to an encoding that doesn't understand some character in the string.  See error:\n\t",uee

    print
    print "Printing information about each character in the original string."
    for char in str:
        try:
            print "\t'" + char + "' = original char {0} repr(char)={1}".format(type(char), repr(char))
        except UnicodeDecodeError as ude:
            print "\t'?' = original char  {0} repr(char)={1} ERROR PRINTING: {2}".format(type(char), repr(char), ude)
        except UnicodeEncodeError as uee:
            print "\t'?' = original char  {0} repr(char)={1} ERROR PRINTING: {2}".format(type(char), repr(char), uee)
            print uee    

        try:
            x = unicode(char)        
            print "\t'" + x + "' = unicode(char) {1} repr(unicode(char))={2}".format(x, type(x), repr(x))
        except UnicodeDecodeError as ude:
            print "\t'?' = unicode(char) ERROR: {0}".format(ude)
        except UnicodeEncodeError as uee:
            print "\t'?' = unicode(char)  {0} repr(char)={1} ERROR PRINTING: {2}".format(type(x), repr(x), uee)

        try:
            x = char.decode('latin_1')
            print "\t'" + x + "' = char.decode('latin_1') {1} repr(char.decode('latin_1'))={2}".format(x, type(x), repr(x))
        except UnicodeDecodeError as ude:
            print "\t'?' = char.decode('latin_1')  ERROR: {0}".format(ude)
        except UnicodeEncodeError as uee:
            print "\t'?' = char.decode('latin_1')  {0} repr(char)={1} ERROR PRINTING: {2}".format(type(x), repr(x), uee)

        try:
            x = char.decode('utf_8')
            print "\t'" + x + "' = char.decode('utf_8') {1} repr(char.decode('utf_8'))={2}".format(x, type(x), repr(x))
        except UnicodeDecodeError as ude:
            print "\t'?' = char.decode('utf_8')  ERROR: {0}".format(ude)
        except UnicodeEncodeError as uee:
            print "\t'?' = char.decode('utf_8')  {0} repr(char)={1} ERROR PRINTING: {2}".format(type(x), repr(x), uee)

        print

x = 'ó'
encodingDemo(x)

Much thanks for the answers below and especially to @John Machin for answering so thoroughly.