Django model utf8 with legacy database

Question

I have a legacy database with latin1 encoding. I do not have access to change it to utf8. When I read values from the model, I am getting garbled text.

I tried to u

Answer 1

If you have access to your 'settings.py' file, then you can change the settings saying that your database is using 'latin1'.

Following is the example of the 'DATABASES' configuration in 'settings.py' file.

DATABASES = {
    'default': {
        'ENGINE': 'django.db.backends.mysql',
        'NAME': 'test_db',
        'USER': 'root',
        'PASSWORD': '',
        'HOST': '',
        'PORT': '3306',
        'OPTIONS': {
                    'charset': 'latin1',
                    'use_unicode': True, },
    }, 
}

I had similar issue earlier, checkout the link here Django database charset issue

Answer 2

u = unicode(name,'latin-1')
print u.encode('utf-8')