Unable to use ¶ in like statement

[pljspahn]

Environment

• Python: 3.10.4
• pyodbc: 4.0.32
• OS: PopOS 22.04
• DB: Eloquence (pretty obscure)
• driver: SQL/R (part of Eloquence, also obscure, see https://www.marxmeier.com/sqlr/ )

Issue

I want to query a field that contains a ¶ character. A basic example of this would be such as:

sql = """
    select
        prod_code,
        prod_loc
    from product
    where prod_loc like '%¶%'
"""

This returns no results while a value in prod_loc is stored like:

&102D&n365 ¶

I set my connection up as:

import pyodbc
from os import environ

class EloquenceConnect:
    cursor = None

    def __init__(self):
        connection = pyodbc.connect('DSN='+environ['ODBC_DSN'])
        connection.setencoding(encoding='utf-8')
        self.cursor = connection.cursor()

I suspect there's some mishap with how I have set up the connection's encoding, or maybe I need to set the decoding as well? Any suggestions on how to handle this?

[v-chojas]

You're right that this likely has something to do with encoding. I suggest retrieving the field from the database through the driver, inspecting the byte sequence to determine the encoding it returned the data in, and using that in sending data to the driver.