django & markdown issue: 'NoneType' object has no attribute 'strip'

Question

I have a problem about markdown and django integration. After I installed markdown and change my model class to:

class Page(models.Model):
    class Translation(multilingual.Translation):
     title = models.CharField(verbose_name="Title", max_length=30,
             help_text="Put a title (max. 30 chars) of your page -e.g. About, CEO, Contact etc...")
     content_markdown = models.TextField(verbose_name="Markdown Content",
              help_text="Use Markdown syntax here.")
     content = models.TextField(verbose_name="Page content as HTML", 
              blank=True, null=True,
                help_text="You don't have to touch here.")
    slug = models.SlugField(verbose_name="Slug",
          help_text="Put here the name of your page without space -e.g. research-development")

    class Meta:
     verbose_name_plural = "Pages"
     ordering = ['id']

    def __unicode__(self):
     return self.title

    def save(self):
     import markdown
     self.content = markdown.markdown(self.content_markdown)
     super(Page, self).save()

    def get_absolute_url(self):
     # return "/%s/%s" % (self.menu.slug, self.slug)
     return "/%s" % self.slug

I got these traceback:

Traceback:
File "/usr/local/lib/python2.6/dist-packages/django/core/handlers/base.py" in get_response
  92.                 response = callback(request, *callback_args, **callback_kwargs)
File "/usr/local/lib/python2.6/dist-packages/django/contrib/admin/options.py" in wrapper
  226.                 return self.admin_site.admin_view(view)(*args, **kwargs)
File "/usr/local/lib/python2.6/dist-packages/django/views/decorators/cache.py" in _wrapped_view_func
  44.         response = view_func(request, *args, **kwargs)
File "/usr/local/lib/python2.6/dist-packages/django/contrib/admin/sites.py" in inner
  186.             return view(request, *args, **kwargs)
File "/usr/local/lib/python2.6/dist-packages/django/db/transaction.py" in _commit_on_success
  240.                 res = func(*args, **kw)
File "/usr/local/lib/python2.6/dist-packages/django/contrib/admin/options.py" in add_view
  734.                 self.save_model(request, new_object, form, change=False)
File "/usr/local/lib/python2.6/dist-packages/django/contrib/admin/options.py" in save_model
  557.         obj.save()
File "/media/DATA/Programming/pyworkspace/djangoprojects/youngjin/../youngjin/archive/models.py" in save
  37.    self.content = markdown.markdown(self.content_markdown)
File "/usr/local/lib/python2.6/dist-packages/Markdown-2.0.1-py2.6.egg/markdown/__init__.py" in markdown
  587.     return md.convert(text)
File "/usr/local/lib/python2.6/dist-packages/Markdown-2.0.1-py2.6.egg/markdown/__init__.py" in convert
  370.         if not source.strip():

Exception Type: AttributeError at /admin/archive/page/add/
Exception Value: 'NoneType' object has no attribute 'strip'

I cannot really figure out what is the problem. Any idea?

Answer 1

I would guess that self.content_markdown might be null in some cases (but I am not sure why, because the default should be to return empty strings instead of null-values if not specified otherwise).

Anyway, can you try the following, just to be sure?

    self.content = markdown.markdown(self.content_markdown or u'')