Django dumpdata fails on special characters

Question

I'm trying to dump my entire DB to a json. When I run python manage.py dumpdata > data.json I get an error:

(env) PS C:\dev\watch_something> python manage.py dumpdata > data.json
CommandError: Unable to serialize database: 'charmap' codec can't encode character '\u0130' in position 1: character maps to <undefined>
Exception ignored in: <generator object cursor_iter at 0x0460C140>
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "C:\dev\watch_something\env\lib\site-packages\django\db\models\sql\compiler.py", line 1602, in cursor_iter
    cursor.close()
sqlite3.ProgrammingError: Cannot operate on a closed database.

It's because one of the characters in my DB is a sepcial character. How can I dump the DB correctly?

FYI, all other DB functionalities work fine

Answer 1

One solution is to use ./manage.py dumpdata -o data.json instead of ./manage.py dumpdata > data.json.

Another solution is to use Python's UTF-8 mode, run:

python -Xutf8 ./manage.py dumpdata > data.json

Answer 2

Here is the solution from djangoproject.com
You go to Settings there's a "Use Unicode UTF-8 for worldwide language support", box in "Language" - "Administrative Language Settings" - "Change system locale" - "Region Settings". If we apply that, and reboot, then we get a sensible, modern, default encoding from Python. djangoproject.com

the settings box looks like this. Enable the check and restart your system

Answer 3

To save json data in django the TextIOWrapper is used:

The default encoding is now locale.getpreferredencoding(False) (...)

In documentation of locale.getpreferredencoding fuction we can read:

Return the encoding used for text data, according to user preferences. User preferences are expressed differently on different systems, and might not be available programmatically on some systems, so this function only returns a guess.

Here I found "hacky" but working method to overwrite these settings:

In file settings.py of your django project add these lines:

import _locale
_locale._getdefaultlocale = (lambda *args: ['en_US', 'utf8'])

Answer 4

On windows the way i solved mine was Add to your settings

import _locale
_locale._getdefaultlocale = (lambda *args: ['en_US', 'utf8'])

run this on shell only on windows

python -Xutf8 manage.py dumpdata --exclude auth.permission --exclude contenttypes > db.json

I actually did this it worked

python -Xutf8 manage.py dumpdata -o data.json

But wasnt showing data from my installed apps