python - How to filter (or replace) unicode characters that would take more than 3 bytes in UTF-8? - Stack Overflow

I'm using Python and Django, but I'm having a problem caused by a limitation of MySQL. According to the MySQL 5.1 documentation, their utf8 implementation does not support 4-byte characters. MySQL 5.5 will support 4-byte characters using utf8mb4; and, someday in future, utf8 might support it as well. But my server is not ready to upgrade to MySQL 5.5, and thus I'm limited to UTF-8 characters that