django character set with MySQL weirdness

Question

I'm seeing

OperationalError (1267, "Illegal mix of collations (latin1_swedish_ci,IMPLICIT) and (utf8_general_ci,COERCIBLE) for operation '='")

It looks like some of my variables are UTF8 strings

'name': 'p\xc7\x9d\xca\x87\xc9\x9f\xc4\xb1\xc9\xa5s Badge'

Is this a configuration issue? If so, how can i solve it? I'd like to handle everything in Unicode (I think).

Answer 1

It appears your database is defaulted to latin1_swedish_ci, and therefore cannot accept all utf8 characters. You need to change the configuration of the MySQL database tables to use utf8_general_ci. A good blogpost about this (with links to a tool) can be found at MySQL Performance Blog