title: 'latin-1' codec can't encode character u'\u2014' in position 23: ordinal not in range(256)
body: <p>I am loading data into a pandas dataframe from an excel workbook and am attempting to push it to a database when I get the above error.</p>
  
  <p>I thought at first the collation of the database was at issue which I changed to utf8_bin</p>
  
  <p>Next I checked the database engine create statement on my end which I added a parameter for the encoding too. </p>
  
  <pre><code>engine = create_engine('mysql+pymysql://root@localhost/test', encoding="utf-8")
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>But neither of these things work I am still getting the error from the line:</p>
  
  <pre><code>df.to_sql("strand", engine, if_exists="append", index=False)
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>I checked if there was an encoding parameter for the to_sql method but this does not seem to be the case. </p>