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Diffstat (limited to 'docs/tutorial01.txt')
| -rw-r--r-- | docs/tutorial01.txt | 29 |
1 files changed, 15 insertions, 14 deletions
diff --git a/docs/tutorial01.txt b/docs/tutorial01.txt index 56a2a3fefc..aea3af6922 100644 --- a/docs/tutorial01.txt +++ b/docs/tutorial01.txt @@ -492,20 +492,21 @@ your own sanity when dealing with the interactive prompt, but also because objects' representations are used throughout Django's automatically-generated admin. -.. admonition:: Why ``__unicode__`` and not ``__str__``? - - If you are wondering why we add a ``__unicode__()`` method, rather than a - simple ``__str__()`` method, it is because Django models will contain - unicode strings by default. The values returned from the database, for - example, are all unicode strings. In most cases, your code should be - prepared to handle non-ASCII characters and this is a litle fiddly in - ``__str__()`` methods, since you have to worry about which encoding to - use, amongst other things. If you create a ``__unicode__()`` method, - Django will provide a ``__str__()`` method that calls your - ``__unicode__()`` and then converts the result to UTF-8 strings when - required. So ``unicode(p)`` will return a unicode string and ``str(p)`` - will return a normal string, with the characters encoded as UTF-8 when - necessary.. +.. admonition:: Why ``__unicode__()`` and not ``__str__()``? + + If you're familiar with Python, you might be in the habit of adding + ``__str__()`` methods to your classes, not ``__unicode__()`` methods. + We use ``__unicode__()`` here because Django models deal with Unicode by + default. All data stored in your database is converted to Unicode when it's + returned. + + Django models have a default ``__str__()`` method that calls ``__unicode__()`` + and converts the result to a UTF-8 bytestring. This means that ``unicode(p)`` + will return a Unicode string, and ``str(p)`` will return a normal string, + with characters encoded as UTF-8. + + If all of this is jibberish to you, just remember to add ``__unicode__()`` + methods to your models. With any luck, things should Just Work for you. Note these are normal Python methods. Let's add a custom method, just for demonstration:: |