Returning pure Django form errors in JSON

Question

Hi

I have a Django form which I'm validating in a normal Django view. I'm trying to figure out how to extract the pure errors (without the HTML formatting). Below is the code I'm using at the moment.

return json_response({ 'success' : False,
                       'errors' : form.errors })

With this, I get the infamous proxy object error from Django. Forcing each error into Unicode won't do the trick either, because then each of the errors' __unicode__ method will be called effectively HTML-izing it.

Any ideas?

EDIT:

For those interested, this is the definition of json_response:

def json_response(x):
    import json
    return HttpResponse(json.dumps(x, sort_keys=True, indent=2),
                        content_type='application/json; charset=UTF-8')

Answer 1

Got it after a lot of messing around, testing different things. N.B. I'm not sure whether this works with internationalization as well. This also takes the first validation error for each field, but modifying it to get all of the errors should be rather easy.

return json_response({ 'success' : False,
                       'errors' : [(k, v[0].__unicode__()) for k, v in form.errors.items()] })

Answer 2

The issue here is that error message are lazy translation object. The docs do mention this:

Just make sure you've got ensure_ascii=False and use a LazyEncoder.

Cheers