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pythondjangoencodingdecodinglatin1

Django Latin Characters do not work

I'm trying to solve this issue when importing a CSV file. I try to save a string variable that contains latin-1 characters and when I try to print them, it changes it to an encoding. Is there anything I can do to keep the encoding? I simply want to keep the character as it is, nothing else.

Here's the issue (as seen from Django's manage shell

>>> variable = "{'job_title': 'préventeur'}"
>>> variable
"{'job_title': 'pr\xc3\xa9venteur'}"

Why does Django or Python automatically change the string? Do I have to change the characterset or something?

Anything will help. Thanks!

Solution

  • Your terminal is entering encoded characters; you are using UTF-8, and thus Python receives two bytes when you type é.

    Decode from UTF-8 in that case:

    >>> print 'pr\xc3\xa9venteur'.decode('utf8')
préventeur

    You really want to read up on Python and Unicode though: