“Can't initialize character set utf8mb4” with Windows mysql-python

Question

I\'m getting an error try to connect to a remote mysql database from a Windows 7 client via python 2.7 + MySQLdb 1.2.5 + sqlalchemy

Answer 1

I've gone around in circles trying to get this to work on Windows.

The only thing that seems to work for me is to execute this once the connection is established:

set names utf8mb4;