title: OperationalError: (2019, ""Can't initialize character set utf8mb4 (path: C:\\mysql\\\\share\\charsets\\)"")
body: <p>I configured my Django database setting in settings.py with:</p>
  
  <pre><code>'OPTIONS': {'charset': 'utf8mb4'},
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>All columns and tables are set to utf8mb4.</p>
  
  <p>I want this encoding so I can store emojis like: </p>
  
  <p>When I start my script on Mac or Linux, it works fine, but on Windows, I get:</p>
  
  <pre><code>    &lt;module&gt;    C:\Users\Josh\Documents\mysite\myproj\scripts\crawler.py    154     
      __getitem__ C:\Python27\Lib\site-packages\django\db\models\query.py 295     
      __iter__    C:\Python27\Lib\site-packages\django\db\models\query.py 256     
      _fetch_all  C:\Python27\Lib\site-packages\django\db\models\query.py 1087        
      __iter__    C:\Python27\Lib\site-packages\django\db\models\query.py 54      
      execute_sql C:\Python27\Lib\site-packages\django\db\models\sql\compiler.py  833     
      cursor  C:\Python27\Lib\site-packages\django\db\backends\base\base.py   231     
      _cursor C:\Python27\Lib\site-packages\django\db\backends\base\base.py   204     
      ensure_connection   C:\Python27\Lib\site-packages\django\db\backends\base\base.py   199     
      __exit__    C:\Python27\Lib\site-packages\django\db\utils.py    94      
      ensure_connection   C:\Python27\Lib\site-packages\django\db\backends\base\base.py   199     
      connect C:\Python27\Lib\site-packages\django\db\backends\base\base.py   171     
      get_new_connection  C:\Python27\Lib\site-packages\django\db\backends\mysql\base.py  263     
      Connect c:\users\josh\appdata\local\temp\easy_install-iz3bc1\MySQL_python-1.2.5-py2.7-win32.egg.tmp\MySQLdb\__init__.py 81      
      __init__    c:\users\josh\appdata\local\temp\easy_install-iz3bc1\MySQL_python-1.2.5-py2.7-win32.egg.tmp\MySQLdb\connections.py  221     
      set_character_set   c:\users\josh\appdata\local\temp\easy_install-iz3bc1\MySQL_python-1.2.5-py2.7-win32.egg.tmp\MySQLdb\connections.py  312     
  "OperationalError: (2019, ""Can't initialize character set utf8mb4 (path: C:\\mysql\\\\share\\charsets\\)"")"   
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>The line of code it throws the exception on is:</p>
  
  <pre><code>Object.objects.filter(last_scraped__isnull=True)[0]
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Versions: </p>
  
  <p>Python 2.7</p>
  
  <p>Database: MariaDB 5.5</p>
  
  <p>Windows 7 64-bit</p>