Python3 import error smart_unicode django

Question

This is my first time ever trying to run a py script

I have a script to auto import to android studio some translations. I installed python 3.10.5 and pip and trying to run a script. I also installed Django 4.0.5

I have this import from django.utils.encoding import smart_str, smart_unicode

When i try to run it, I get the error

ImportError: cannot import name 'smart_unicode' from 'django.utils.encoding' (C:\Users\a816353\AppData\Local\Programs\Python\Python310\lib\site-packages\django\utils\encoding.py)

I have tried some suggestions but I cant figure out what to do.

Answer 1

TL;DR: Your code was written for, and will only run on, Python 2 and Django 1.x. For Python 3 and all later versions of Django (2.0+), the function smart_unicode should be replaced by smart_str, and any old uses of smart_str should be replaced by smart_bytes.

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The smart_* functions from django.utils.encoding have evolved quit a bit throughout Django's history.

Back in Python 2, Django had two functions, smart_str and smart_unicode, which corresponded to Python 2's str and unicode types. In Python 2, str represented an arbitrarily encoded sequence of bytes, while unicode represented a sequence of Unicode codepoints. However, when Python 3 came along, string representation in Python changed. The builtins str and unicode were replaced by bytes and str, where bytes represents an arbitrary sequence of bytes (what str modeled in Python 2), and str represents a Unicode string (what unicode modeled in Python 2). Correspondingly, Django 1.4 renamed the functions smart_str and smart_unicode to smart_bytes and smart_text respectively. For backwards compatibility, Python 2 releases of Django 1.x kept smart_unicode as an alias for smart_text and smart_str as an alias of smart_bytes. Meanwhile, Python 3 releases of Django 1.x dropped smart_unicode entirely and made smart_str an alias of smart_text.

When Django 2.0 was released, support for Python 2 was dropped, so the name smart_unicode ceased to exist entirely. This left smart_str and smart_text as being equivalent names for what smart_unicode used to be.

In Django 3.0 smart_text was deprecated, and then removed in Django 4.0. These days, smart_str is the appropriate equivalent for what smart_unicode used to be.

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Since the code you're working with includes reference to smart_unicode, it must have been written for Django 1.x. If you want to make it work as-in, you'll need to downgrade your Django version. But be advised that extended support for the last version of Django 1.x (v1.11) ended in April 2022, and that all releases of Django 1.x before 1.11.17 only support Python 3.6 or below, which itself reached its end-of-life in December 2021.

If you want to go the route of upgrading your code to be compatible with modern versions of Django, the correct replacement for smart_unicode is smart_str. For help with this process, see

• Python Docs - Porting Python 2 Code to Python 3
• Django - Porting to Python 3
• Django - How to upgrade Django to a newer version
• Django - Deprecation Timeline
• Django - Backwards incompatible changes in 2.0
• Django - Backwards incompatible changes in 3.0
• Django - Backwards incompatible changes in 4.0