Entering emoji fails in django + mysql even with utf8mb4_unicode_ci

Question

I'm trying to insert an emoji into my title column in my django + MySQL app.

I edited the database directly with PhpMyAdmin. I changed the charset of the column to utf8mb4_unicode_ci and manually inserted an emoji in the table.

This is the table structure:

And this is the table row with an emoji:

But when I open this object in the django admin, the emoji is missing:

And if I try to enter the emoji and save, I get this exception:

MySQLdb._exceptions.OperationalError: (1366, "Incorrect string value: '\\\\xF0\\\\x9F\\\\x92\\\\xA9' for column 'title' at row 1")

What am I missing?

Answer 1

What's missing is the charset option for the mysql database

DATABASES = {
    'default': {
        'ENGINE': 'django.db.backends.mysql',
        ...
        'OPTIONS': {
            ...
            'charset': 'utf8mb4',
        },
    }
}