Non-ascii string in verbose_name argument when declaring DB field in Django.

Answer 1

First, I would explicitly define your description as a Unicode string:

class Buddy(models.Model):
    name=models.CharField(u'ФИО',max_len)

Note the 'u' in u'ФИО'.

Secondly, do you have a __unicode__() function defined on your model? If so, make sure that it returns a Unicode string. It's very likely you're getting this error when the Admin interface tries to access the unicode representation of the model, not when it's added to the database. If you're returning a non-unicode string from __unicode__(), it may cause this problem.