I had an annoying problem in my Django app when I translated it to Hebrew, & started adding Hebrew data. It would yell the regular ‘ascii can’t decode non-ascii characters’ error page. I dug a bit inside the admin code but didn’t see something wrong or fixable.

So today I finally understood I need to change the __str__ method to __unicode__ . This solved the problem completely. Too bad it doesn’t appear in the Django documentation nowhere. I would expect it in the Internationalization page & the tutorials too!