Django now with more Unicode

Yesterday Malcolm Tredinnick merged the so called unicode-branch of Django into the main branch and with this made all Unicode goodness available to those people sticking to the primary development tree of Django.


What does this mean in detail?

Django natively supports Unicode data everywhere. Providing your database can somehow store the data, you can safely pass around Unicode strings to templates, models and the database.

Django Unicode documentation

Besides that Django now also has (at least some) support for IRIs (the international relatives of URIs ;-) )

Just to name a few changes. This is a huuuuuge merge and it comes with tons of changes that are all documented in the docs/unicode.txt of your Django checkout so better read on there :-) And if you want to migrate an existing app to support Unicode, this checklist should help.

For me personally this also fixed quite a few problems I had thanks to stupid charset clashes that happened while I was jumping from blogging software to blogging software and now wanted to write an importer for this broken data into my Django-based CMS/blogging tool. I can’t wait until I can put zerokspot v5 online ;-)