title: PYODBC corrupts utf8 data (reading from MYSQL information_schema DB)
body: <p><strong>EDIT:</strong>
  I completely reworked this question to reflect my better understanding of the problem </p>
  
  <p>The PYODBC+MYSQL command used to fetch all table names in my DB</p>
  
  <pre><code>cursor.execute("select table_name from information_schema.tables where
               table_schema='mydbname'")
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>The result is a list of unicode strings with <strong>every second character omitted</strong>, in each string.</p>
  
  <p>The <code>information_schema</code> DB is utf8, although my table names are pure ascii. Reading from my DB which is latin1 works fine. Executing <code>set character_set_* = 'utf8'</code> does not help.</p>
  
  <p>Executing the same query from a C++/ODBC test program works fine.</p>
  
  <p>Do you know how <code>pyodbc</code> works wrt to character encoding? What encoding does it assume when working with a utf8 DB?</p>
  
  <p>I work on Linux with UnixODBC, python 2.6.4, pyodbc 2.1.7</p>