How to set the encoding for the tables' char columns in django?

Question

I have a project written in Django. All fields that are supposed to store some strings are supposed to be in UTF-8, however, when I run

manage.py syncdb

all respective columns are created with cp1252 character set (where did it get that -- I have no idea) and I have to manually update every column...

Is there a way to tell Django to create all those columns with UTF-8 encoding in the first place?

BTW, I use MySQL.

Answer 1

Django does not specify charset and collation in CREATE TABLE statements. Everything is determined by database charset. Doing ALTER DATABASE ... CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_general_ci before running syncdb should help.

For connection, Django issues SET NAMES utf8 automatically, so you don't need to worry about default connection charset settings.