2 files changed, 21 insertions, 1 deletions

diff --git a/lib/sqlalchemy/dialects/mysql/base.py b/lib/sqlalchemy/dialects/mysql/base.py
index 8933e0b70..5647c38f2 100644
--- a/lib/sqlalchemy/dialects/mysql/base.py
+++ b/lib/sqlalchemy/dialects/mysql/base.py
@@ -3298,9 +3298,17 @@ class _DecodingRowProxy(object):
     # sets.Set(['value']) (seriously) but thankfully that doesn't
     # seem to come up in DDL queries.
 
+    _encoding_compat = {
+        'koi8r': 'koi8_r',
+        'koi8u': 'koi8_u',
+        'utf16': 'utf-16-be',  # MySQL's uft16 is always bigendian
+        'utf8mb4': 'utf8',  # real utf8
+        'eucjpms': 'ujis',
+    }
+
     def __init__(self, rowproxy, charset):
         self.rowproxy = rowproxy
-        self.charset = charset
+        self.charset = self._encoding_compat.get(charset, charset)
 
     def __getitem__(self, index):
         item = self.rowproxy[index]
diff --git a/lib/sqlalchemy/dialects/mysql/mysqldb.py b/lib/sqlalchemy/dialects/mysql/mysqldb.py
index 0d125a245..a65f69622 100644
--- a/lib/sqlalchemy/dialects/mysql/mysqldb.py
+++ b/lib/sqlalchemy/dialects/mysql/mysqldb.py
@@ -28,6 +28,18 @@ unicode** will include both charset and use_unicode=0::
 
     create_engine("mysql+mysqldb://user:pass@host/dbname?charset=utf8&use_unicode=0")
 
+For MySQL versions 5.5.3 and MySQLdb version 1.2.3 forward, the special
+MySQL-specific encoding 'utf8mb4' is now recommended::
+
+    create_engine("mysql+mysqldb://user:pass@host/dbname?charset=utf8mb4&use_unicode=0")
+
+The 'utf8' encoding may still be used, however MySQL will only support
+unicode characters within the first three of four possible bytes:
+no (💩 or 😻) note that in order to use utf8mb4 fully, changes to
+the MySQL schema and/or server configuration may be required.
+See also: `The utf8mb4 character set
+<http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.5/en/charset-unicode-utf8mb4.html>_`.
+
 As of this writing, MySQLdb only runs on Python 2.   It is not known how
 MySQLdb behaves on Python 3 as far as unicode decoding.