SQLAlchemy convert field using utf8 - mysql

Question

How do I get the equivalent SQLAlchemy statement for this SQL query?
select CONVERT(blobby USING utf8) as blobby from myTable where CONVERT(blobby USING utf8)="Hello";
Where blobby is a blob type field that has to be unblobbed to a string.
I tried this
DBSession.query(myTable).filter(myTable.blobby.encode(utf-8)="Hello").first()
But doesn't work. Gives out a queer error
AttributeError: Neither 'InstrumentedAttribute' object nor 'Comparator' object associated with myTable.blobby has an attribute 'encode'
Moreover, I tried inserting into the database as follows:
que=myTable(blobby=str(x.blobby))
DBSession.add(que)
This also returns an error that says
(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.
This error goes away if I insert like
que=myTable(blobby=str(x))
But the inserted entries do not support foreign language values..
EDIT:-
This is what I am trying to do :
I have a list of utf-8 strings. The sqlalchemy column which I am
trying to insert my string has the property "convert_unicode" set to
true. Now, I have to insert these strings into my database without
loss of data. I need to preserve my multilingual characters which
worked fine when I fetched them as utf-8 from my Mysql database.
Trouble here is inserting them into SQLite using SQLalchemy.
Please help. Thanks and Regards.

Answer 1

So here is what I did to get rid of my encoding hell, and this error.
UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec
can't decode byte 0xc4 in position
10: ordinal not in range(128)
I shall explain it stepwise.
Use this command : type(mydirtyunicodestring) .
If it returns
then it means you have to convert it to unicode to get
rid of the error.(byte string!!!!)
Use dirtystring.decode('utf-8')
or any other format to get your type to There you
go. No more 8 bit programming errors that go ProgrammingError) You must not use 8-bit bytestrings unless you use a text_factory that can interpret 8-bit bytestrings (like text_factory = str).