how to set django and mysql work with UTF-8

Question

I want to set my Django/mysql site to work with UTF-8. Please guide me the changes I have to make in django and mysql to make sure the following things.

1. User entered data in the forms will be always encoded as UTF-8

2. Storing the data in mysql as utf-8

3. Displaying utf8 encoded data in the template correctly

4. Also I want to know whether moving to UTF-8 encoding will remove unicode decode error like below.

UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xc2 in position 55: ordinal not in range(128)

Many Thanks.

Solution

here some advices:

1) use utf8 encoding when creating database

CREATE DATABASE <dbname> CHARACTER SET utf8;

docs

2) place the following special comment in the first or second lines of your script:

# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-

nice article about python and utf8

3) Use unicode strings with u prefix in *.py files

unicodeString = u"hello Unicode world!"

4) Use follwing meta tag in section of your base template:

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">