How to set the encoding for the tables' char columns in django?

Question

I have a project written in Django. All fields that are supposed to store some strings are supposed to be in UTF-8, however, when I run

manage.py syncdb

all respective columns are created with cp1252 character set (where did it get that -- I have no idea) and I have to manually update every column...

Is there a way to tell Django to create all those columns with UTF-8 encoding in the first place?

BTW, I use MySQL.

Answer 1

Django’s database backends automatically handles Unicode strings into the appropriate encoding and talk to the database. You don’t need to tell Django what encoding your database uses. It handles it well, by using you database's encoding.

I don't see any way you can tell django to create a column, using some specific encoding. As it appears to me, there is absolutely some previous MySQL configuration affecting you. And despite of doing it manually for all column, use these.

CREATE DATABASE db_name
    [[DEFAULT] CHARACTER SET charset_name]
    [[DEFAULT] COLLATE collation_name]

ALTER DATABASE db_name
    [[DEFAULT] CHARACTER SET charset_name]
    [[DEFAULT] COLLATE collation_name]

Answer 2

What is your MySQL encoding set to?

For example, try the following from the command line:

 mysqld --verbose --help | grep character-set

If it doesn't output utf8, then you'll need to set the output in my.cnf:

[mysqld]
character-set-server=utf8
default-collation=utf8_unicode_ci

[client]
default-character-set=utf8

This page has some more information:

• http://www.zulutown.com/blog/tag/character-set/

Answer 3

Django does not specify charset and collation in CREATE TABLE statements. Everything is determined by database charset. Doing ALTER DATABASE ... CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_general_ci before running syncdb should help.

For connection, Django issues SET NAMES utf8 automatically, so you don't need to worry about default connection charset settings.