= The unicode branch =

This branch aims to make Django's internals fully Unicode-aware.


== How to get the branch ==

{{{
svn co http://code.djangoproject.com/svn/django/branches/unicode/
}}}

See our [http://www.djangoproject.com/documentation/contributing/#branch-policy branch policy] for full information on how to use a branch.

== Goals ==

The main goals of this branch are:

 * Make it easier for developers to work with non-ASCII character data when working with Django.
 * Be more consistent in our string handling behaviour inside Django (see StringEncoding for details on this).

== Status ==

The branch was created on April 7, 2007.

== Todo Items ==

The various pieces will be converted in roughly the following order:

 1. Template rendering
 2. Database I/O (requires introducing new DATABASE_CHARSET setting)
 3. Model class support
 4. Form input encoding
 5. Other output methods (if necessary; unchecked as yet)
    * syndication
    * serialisation
    * Google sitemaps
 6. Other contrib modules

We also need to look at the i18n support functions (in django.utils.translation):

 * Decide on usage of gettext() versus ugettext() in a number of places.
 * Look at rewriting gettext_lazy() so that it acts as a better string and unicode proxy.