Convert a list with wrong encoding to utf8

[vergos.nikolas at gmail.com]

Τη Πέμπτη, 14 Φεβρουαρίου 2019 - 9:14:08 μ.μ. UTC+2, ο χρήστης Igor Korot έγραψε:
> Hi,
> 
> On Thu, Feb 14, 2019 at 1:10 PM <vergos.nikolas at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > Τη Πέμπτη, 14 Φεβρουαρίου 2019 - 8:16:40 μ.μ. UTC+2, ο χρήστης Calvin Spealman έγραψε:
> > > If you see something like this
> > >
> > > '\xce\x86\xce\xba\xce\xb7\xcf\x82
> > > \xce\xa4\xcf\x83\xce\xb9\xce\xac\xce\xbc\xce\xb7\xcf\x82'
> > >
> > > then you don't have a string, you have raw bytes. You don't "encode" bytes,
> > > you decode them. If you know this is already encoded as UTF-8 then you just
> > > need the decode('utf8') part and *not* the encode('latin1') step.
> > >
> > > encode() is something that turns text into bytes
> > > decode() is something that turns bytes into text
> > >
> > > So, if you already have bytes and you need text, you should only want to be
> > > doing a decode() and you just need to specific the correct encoding.
> >
> > I Agree but I don't know in what encoding the string is encoded into.
> >
> > I just tried
> >
> > names = tuple( [s.decode('utf8') for s in names] )
> >
> > but i get the error of:
> >
> > AttributeError("'str' object has no attribute 'decode'",)
> >
> > but why it says s is a string object? Since we have names in raw bytes is should be a bytes object?
> >
> > How can i turn names from raw bytes to utf-8 strings?
> >
> > ps. Who encoded them in raw bytes anyways? Since they fetced directly from the database shouldn't python3 have them stored in names as utf-8 strings? why raw bytes instead?
> 
> What DBMS? How do you access the DB?
> Maybe the field is BLOB?


No, the fields are all 'varchar'

i use pymysql and i utilize it like so to grab the values from the db as utf-8.

con = pymysql.connect( db = 'clientele', user = 'vergos', passwd = '******', charset = 'utf8' )
cur = con.cursor()