Django model utf8 with legacy database

Question

I have a legacy database with latin1 encoding. I do not have access to change it to utf8. When I read values from the model, I am getting garbled text.

I tried to use name.decode('utf-8') but it is throwing a unicode error:

 'ascii' codec can't encode characters in position 4-12: ordinal not in range(128)

name.encode('utf-8') doesnt work either.

It is supposed to be some chinese text. If latin1 is showing some garbled text. — wjh, Mar 27 '13 at 05:59

score 3 · Accepted Answer · edited May 23 '17 at 12:08

3

If you have access to your 'settings.py' file, then you can change the settings saying that your database is using 'latin1'.

Following is the example of the 'DATABASES' configuration in 'settings.py' file.

DATABASES = {
    'default': {
        'ENGINE': 'django.db.backends.mysql',
        'NAME': 'test_db',
        'USER': 'root',
        'PASSWORD': '',
        'HOST': '',
        'PORT': '3306',
        'OPTIONS': {
                    'charset': 'latin1',
                    'use_unicode': True, },
    }, 
}

I had similar issue earlier, checkout the link here Django database charset issue

edited May 23 '17 at 12:08

Community

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1

answered Mar 27 '13 at 07:52

Krishna Balan

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Thanks. This works. But do you have any idea how to set the charset for individual tables? Some of the tables use latin1 and some use utf-8. – wjh Mar 27 '13 at 08:08
AFAIK Django doesn't support setting charset for individual tables. But i guess there would be some way to do it. – Krishna Balan Mar 27 '13 at 09:11

score 1 · Answer 2 · answered Mar 27 '13 at 06:11

1

u = unicode(name,'latin-1')
print u.encode('utf-8')

answered Mar 27 '13 at 06:11

catherine

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12
61
85

Django model utf8 with legacy database

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