I got strange error message when tried to save first_name, last_name to Django's auth_user model.
Failed examples
user = User.object.create_user(username, email, password)
user.first_name = u'Rytis'
user.last_name = u'Slatkevičius'
user.save()
>>> Incorrect string value: '\xC4\x8Dius' for column 'last_name' at row 104
user.first_name = u'Валерий'
user.last_name = u'Богданов'
user.save()
>>> Incorrect string value: '\xD0\x92\xD0\xB0\xD0\xBB...' for column 'first_name' at row 104
user.first_name = u'Krzysztof'
user.last_name = u'Szukiełojć'
user.save()
>>> Incorrect string value: '\xC5\x82oj\xC4\x87' for column 'last_name' at row 104
Succeed examples
user.first_name = u'Marcin'
user.last_name = u'Król'
user.save()
>>> SUCCEED
MySQL settings
mysql> show variables like 'char%';
+--------------------------+----------------------------+
| Variable_name | Value |
+--------------------------+----------------------------+
| character_set_client | utf8 |
| character_set_connection | utf8 |
| character_set_database | utf8 |
| character_set_filesystem | binary |
| character_set_results | utf8 |
| character_set_server | utf8 |
| character_set_system | utf8 |
| character_sets_dir | /usr/share/mysql/charsets/ |
+--------------------------+----------------------------+
8 rows in set (0.00 sec)
Table charset and collation
Table auth_user has utf-8 charset with utf8_general_ci collation.
Results of UPDATE command
It didn't raise any error when updating above values to auth_user table by using UPDATE command.
mysql> update auth_user set last_name='Slatkevičiusa' where id=1;
Query OK, 1 row affected, 1 warning (0.00 sec)
Rows matched: 1 Changed: 1 Warnings: 0
mysql> select last_name from auth_user where id=100;
+---------------+
| last_name |
+---------------+
| Slatkevi?iusa |
+---------------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)
PostgreSQL
The failed values listed above can be updated into PostgreSQL table when I switched the database backend in Django. It's strange.
mysql> SHOW CHARACTER SET;
+----------+-----------------------------+---------------------+--------+
| Charset | Description | Default collation | Maxlen |
+----------+-----------------------------+---------------------+--------+
...
| utf8 | UTF-8 Unicode | utf8_general_ci | 3 |
...
But from http://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.1/interactive/multibyte.html, I found the following:
Name Bytes/Char
UTF8 1-4
Is it means unicode char has maxlen of 4 bytes in PostgreSQL but 3 bytes in MySQL which caused above error?