DjangoUnicodeDecodeError and force_unicode

Question

I've simple Django model of news entry:

class NewsEntry(models.Model):
    pub_date = models.DateTimeField('date published')
    title = models.CharField(max_length = 200)
    summary = models.TextField()
    content = models.TextField()

def __unicode__(self):
    return self.title

Adding new news (in Admin page) with english text works fine but when i try to add news with russian text there is error:

TemplateSyntaxError at /admin/news/newsentry/

Caught DjangoUnicodeDecodeError while rendering: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xd0 in position 0: ordinal not in range(128). You passed in NewsEntry: [Bad Unicode data] (class 'antek.news.models.NewsEntry')

Django Version: 1.2.2

Exception Type: TemplateSyntaxError

Exception Value: Caught DjangoUnicodeDecodeError while rendering: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xd0 in position 0: ordinal not in range(128). You passed in NewsEntry: [Bad Unicode data] (class 'antek.news.models.NewsEntry')

Exception Location: /usr/local/lib/python2.6/dist-packages/django/utils/encoding.py in >force_unicode, line 88

Python Version: 2.6.5

The last item in traceback list is:

/usr/local/lib/python2.6/dist-packages/django/utils/encoding.py in force_unicode

Local vars:

e: UnicodeDecodeError('ascii', '\xd0\xa2\xd0\xb5\xd1\x81\xd1\x82 \xd1\x80\xd1\x83\xd1\x81\xd1\x81\xd0\xba\xd0\xbe\xd0\xb3\xd0\xbe', 0, 1, 'ordinal not in range(128)')

Code looks correct: self.title is unicode object. Also, djangoproject.com use similar code in their blog application.

I spend much time to solve this problem and founded strange solution:

from django.utils.encoding import force_unicode
# ...
def __unicode__(self):
    return force_unicode(self.title)

But due to self.title is unicode object, force_unicode should return it without any changes.

Why return self.title doesn't work?

Answer 1

Problem was in utf8_bin collation in MySQL server. Full information here.