Forem: Fabio Caccamo

How to use Emojis in a Python + Django + MySQL project

Fabio Caccamo — Tue, 30 May 2023 12:30:00 +0000

Did you ever received an error like this while saving some text containing Emojis to the database?

DataError at /admin/myapp/mymodel/1/change/
(1366, "Incorrect string value: '\\xF0\\x9F\\x99...' for column 'text' at row 1")

To overcome this problem you have to change the database and application charset to utf8mb4:

MySQL

Backup your database
Edit MySQL conf and add/set the charset settings:

nano /etc/mysql/mysql.conf.d/mysqld.cnf

#
# * Character Set
#
character_set_server = utf8mb4
collation_server = utf8mb4_unicode_ci

Update database tables character-set to utf8mb4:

SELECT CONCAT('ALTER TABLE ', table_name, ' CONVERT TO CHARACTER SET utf8mb4 COLLATE utf8mb4_unicode_ci;') AS alter_statement
FROM information_schema.tables
WHERE table_schema = 'mydatabasename';

Run the generated ALTER statements
Restart MySQL:

/etc/init.d/mysql restart

Django

Add the charset option with utf8mb4 value to your database settings:

DATABASES = {
    "default": {
        "ENGINE": "django.db.backends.mysql",
        # ...
        "OPTIONS": {
            "charset": "utf8mb4",
        },
    },
}

Restart your application server

Done, now you can store Emojis in your database! 🚀

How to improve the default django admin

Fabio Caccamo — Tue, 29 Oct 2019 17:43:39 +0000

I work on a daily basis with python/django since 9 years now and I like it very much.

One of the best aspects of working with django is its admin, it is very simple to use (also for clients), but it lacks in customization.

Before giving backend access to the clients I always did some customization to the admin (like changing the logo and the main colors) to match the client identity.

It was boring and repetitive work, so I decided to write a library to do it.

The result is the django-admin-interface library and these are the main features:

Themes management and customization (title, logo and colors)
Related popup-windows replaced by modals
Environment name/marker
Language chooser

It is open-source on GitHub a lot of people use it:
https://github.com/fabiocaccamo/django-admin-interface

python-benedict: dict subclass with keypath support, standardized IO shortcuts and many utilities.

Fabio Caccamo — Mon, 21 Oct 2019 08:20:28 +0000

Recently I was involved in a project were I had to load data from different providers, each one providing data in a different format, JSON in the best case but even in XML or YAML.

Received data was dirty and pretty far from being the data you would like to receive, for example:

Extra white space in values
Boolean values expressed using words like Yes or No
Datetime values always expressed in different formats
Keys didn't respect a standard naming convention like snake_case or camelCase
Unexpected data structure changes without any warning by the provider

To wake me up from this nightmare I decided to normalize and simplify the whole process reducing unexpected errors near to zero.

The abstract problem was always the same:

Reading/writing data from/to different formats in a standard way
Accessing nested data values quickly, using keypath
Get data values trying to parse them in the expected type

I decided to write my own library.

python-benedict is a dict subclass with keypath support, I/O shortcuts (Base64, JSON, TOML, XML, YAML, query-string) and many utility methods.

It's open-source on GitHub:
https://github.com/fabiocaccamo/python-benedict

Check it out, any feedback is appreciated.
Thanks