Django ORM and Unicode data

Question

I'm using following model to store info about pages:

class Page(models.Model):
    title = models.TextField(blank = False, null = False)

New data saves correctly, I'm saving Unicode data there (lots of non-ASCII titles). But when I'm performing query:

page = Page.objects.filter(id = 1)

page.title looks odd:

u'\u042e\u0449\u0435\u043d\u043a\u043e'

What could I made wrong? Thanks.

Update: Really, when I'm print page.title - it looks OK. But I need to dump it to JSON, so after such code:

dumps({'title': page.title})

All looks bad.

Update 2: Thanks to everyone, pointed me that this behavoir is correct. But unicode-escaped strins are so long. Can I translate them to utf-8 somehow?

Answer 1

Might just be your shell not being able to display unicode characters maybe?

What happens if you do print page.title?

Answer 2

That's perfectly fine. It's "Ющенко" unicode-escaped.

Answer 3

You're doing nothing wrong. Have you tried printing it (or outputting it in a web page)?

In [1]: l = u'\u042e\u0449\u0435\u043d\u043a\u043e'

In [2]: print l
Ющенко

Answer 4

There is no problem with what you have posted so far.

>>> print json.dumps(u'\u042e\u0449\u0435\u043d\u043a\u043e')
"\u042e\u0449\u0435\u043d\u043a\u043e"

Which is a correct JavaScript string literal. Assign that to a variable and you'll get Ющенко in a JavaScript string.

What is the actual problem? What “looks bad”?

Answer 5

That's correct behaviour: dumps encodes the json for you. It looks ugly now, but that's just for transmission. To see your unicode string again have to decode it (usually on the other end):

>>> from django.utils.simplejson import dumps, loads
>>> original = u'\u042e\u0449\u0435\u043d\u043a\u043e'
>>> print original
Ющенко
>>> encoded = dumps(original)
>>> print encoded
"\u042e\u0449\u0435\u043d\u043a\u043e"
>>> decoded = loads(encoded)
>>> print decoded
Ющенко

Generally you won't need to decode it in python, it'll get loaded as a unicode string in javascript.