Django dumpdata UTF-8 (Unicode)

Here I wrote a snippet for that. Works for me!

django-admin.py dumpdata yourapp could dump for that purpose.

Or if you use MySQL, you could use the mysqldump command to dump the whole database.

And this thread has many ways to dump data, including manual methods.

UPDATE: because OP edited the question.

To convert from JSON encoding string to human readable string you could use this:

open("mydata-new.json","wb").write(open("mydata.json").read().decode("unicode_escape").encode("utf8"))

You need to either find the call to json.dump*() in the Django code and pass the additional option ensure_ascii=False and then encode the result after, or you need to use json.load*() to load the JSON and then dump it with that option.

After struggling with similar issues, I've just found, that xml formatter handles UTF8 properly.

manage.py dumpdata --format=xml > output.xml

I had to transfer data from Django 0.96 to Django 1.3. After numerous tries with dump/load data, I've finally succeeded using xml. No side effects for now.

Hope this will help someone, as I've landed at this thread when looking for a solution..