Django: Accented characters in settings.py are bro

I have accented characters in my settings.py that I access in a view using getattr(settings, 'MY_CONSTANT_NAME', []) but the getattr() call return broken characters (for example, "ô" become: "\xc3\xb4").

here is the code in view.py:

    from django.conf import settings

    def getValueFromSetting(request):
        mimetype = 'application/json' 
        charset=utf-8' datasources = getattr(settings, 'MY_CONSTANT_NAME', []) 
        config= '{' 
        config+= '"datasources": ' + str(datasources).replace("'", '"') 
        config+= '}'

        return HttpResponse(config,mimetype)

What I have done so far to try to solve the problem:

I put # -- coding: utf-8 -- as the first line of my settings.py and my views.py
I put u'ô' or unicode('ô') in front of special characters in settings.py
I put DEFAULT_CHARSET = 'utf-8' in settings.py
I try all possible combination of .decode('utf-8'), .encode('utf-8'), .decode('iso-8859-1'), .encode('iso-8859-1') on the special characters in settings.py or in the views.py...

Nothing solve the problem.

Any suggestion to solve this problem?

Thank you

Etienne

I assume you're seeing these \xc3\xb4 strings in your browser.. Have you tried editing your template file to define the proper charset in the HTML header?

<head>
  <meta name="description" content="example" />
  <meta name="keywords" content="something" />
  <meta name="author" content="Etienne" />
  <meta charset="UTF-8" />      <!--  <---- This line -->
</head>

Edit after your first comment in this answer:

I suspect getattr will not work with other than ascii encoding. Do you think something like the following will not do what you want?

from django.conf import settings

def getValueFromSetting(request):
    myConstantValue = settings.MY_CONSTANT_NAME
    # check myConstantValue here

Edit after last comments:

I think now I understand your problem. You don't like the fact that the JSON returned by the view is ASCII-only. I recommend you to use dumps function provided by the json module bundled with Python. Here's an example:

# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
# other required imports here
import json

def dumpjson(request):
   response = HttpResponse(json.dumps(settings.CONSTANT_TUPLE, encoding='utf-8', ensure_ascii=False), content_type='application/json')

   return response

The CONSTANT_TUPLE in the example is just a copy of DATABASES in my settings.py.

The important bit here is ensure_ascii=False. Could you try it? Is that what you want?