Tag Archives: django

Programming

Django/Python: UnicodeDecodeError error printing Youtube unicoded data

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I was having a problem printing Youtube’s Unicode data using my print method:

print "<p>Video: desc=%s</p>" % (vid.desc)

I’m not well versed with Unicode data, so I was just able to brute force out of this problem, and get rid of the UnicodeDecodeError “ordinal out of range”, by doing the following:

print "<p>Video: desc=%s</p>" % (unicode(vid.desc,'iso-8859-1'))

PS: My database information is in utf-8 format. So, in my understanding, this is converting that utf-8 data into iso-8859-1 to show to the users.

Helpful Tips

Django on CentOS Python 2.6 VirtualEnv Using GeekyMedia RPMs

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Django on centos geekymedia

for setuptools (easy_install):

wget http://pypi.python.org/packages/2.6/s/setuptools/setuptools-0.6c11-py2.6.egg#md5=bfa92100bd772d5a213eedd356d64086
easy_install *setuptools*

use it to install pip:
easy_install pip

download MySQLdb and install by:
python26 setup.py build
python26 setup.py install

download virtualenv
mkdir ~/.virtualenvs

add to .bashrc
VIRTUALENVWRAPPER_PYTHON=/usr/bin/python26
source /usr/bin/virtualenvwrapper.sh

initialize virtualenv
mkdir dev
virtualenv dev

Start virtualenv for current session
source dev/bin/activate

now install packages, they will go inside virtualenv (since we are activated)
pip install django
pip install south
pip install pil

Create django project and app
cd dev/
django-admin.py startproject myproj
cd myproj
python manage.py startapp polls

Programming

Convert Django MySQL Database Tables to Unicode

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When I created a Django application, I hadn’t noticed that my MySQL was defaulted to latin character set (probably by Virtualmin or CentOS’s default MySQL values). So I didn’t want to delete my current project and start again. So here are the commands to convert a database to unicode:

for the database

ALTER DATABASE djangodb CONVERT TO CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_general_ci

on each table do

ALTER TABLE djangotablename CONVERT TO CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_general_ci
Programming

Django: “Error importing authentication backend”

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This is probably a very rare error that one may encounter in Django. But I think I should share it here, as it would save about an hour of anybody else who has this problem.

Problem
Exception Type: ImproperlyConfigured at /
Error importing authentication backend

Probable Cause
I was very desparate to change the name of an app inside my Django project. I renamed the folder name and all possible mentions of the application name anywhere in the code and the database tables (Please note: This is not recommended, there is probably a better solution to do this). Once I faced that problem with no clear indication of where I was going wrong, I looked everywhere in the code and the database. After going into panic mode, I tried desperately changing and removing anything that may break. In the end, I ran out of places to find the application name but the error still existed.

Solution
I had noticed after looking at my cookies that I still had cookies from my session, which meant that everytime I connected to the server, I was trying to pass my “delicious” cookies. But just deleting your own cookies won’t do it. The session object of the user was cached in the database inside the table “django_session”. This especially stores the “AUTHENTICATION_BACKENDS” last used. So, truncate the table: TRUNCATE TABLE django_session to finally get rid of this nasty problem.