Django+MySQL: How To Fix Unicode (aka Mysterious Question Marks)

Posted June 11, 2008 * Comments(5)

If you’re running into the problem where unicode items in your Django / MySQL project are displayed as question marks, here’s the likely problem and solution, found in this django-users thread:

The likely problem is that your MySQL encoding is set to latin1, as opposed to utf8. You can check this via:

 mysqld --verbose --help | grep character-set

You’ll probably see:

character-set-server              latin1

You want this to be uft8. To modify it, edit your my.conf file ( /etc/mysql/my.conf on ubuntu ), adding the following lines to the appropriate sections:


[client]
...
default-character-set = utf8

[mysqld]
...
character-set-server=utf8
collation-server=utf8_unicode_ci
init_connect='set collation_connection = utf8_unicode_ci;'

Now restart mysql:


sudo /etc/init.d/mysql restart

And alter your existing tables to use the utf8 encoding:


mysql your_db_name

alter table your_table_name convert to character set utf8;

And that should do it.

5 Comments so far

  1. Apreche.net » Blog Archive » links for 2008-11-20 on November 20th, 2008

    [...] Django+MySQL: How To Fix Unicode (aka Mysterious Question Marks) – Standard Deviations (tags: mysql django python unicode) Category: del.icio.us  |  Comment (RSS)  |  Trackback [...]

  2. Ted on October 6th, 2010

    I just wanted to give you a HUGE THANK YOU for posting these instructions. I had migrated a MySQL database from 3.23 to 5.x, using mysqldump. With the new server, some PHP pages started showing “?” in place of certain characters, like quotes and em-dashes. I simply edited my.cnf on the MySQL server, restarted, and all is well! You saved me a ton of time digging around to fix this!

  3. xixi on April 7th, 2011

    MILLION thanks mate, big up!

  4. mike waites on July 4th, 2011

    YOUR A LEGEND, been having so much trouble using tinymce for a TextField on my blog model this seems to have solved the problem!! thanks again!

  5. Pedro Carvalho on July 7th, 2011

    million and one thanks!

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