Question

I’m learning Django through the tutorials on their website and I’m running into a weird problem. At this step when I get to the part where I enter the unicode snippets so that

>>> Poll.objects.all()

will return not this

[<Poll: Poll object>]

but something like this

[<Poll: What's up?>]

for some reason the code only works when I copy and paste it in, and not when I type it in. Any ideas why this is happening?

::

So here is the code that wouldn’t format in the comments:

from django.db import models

import datetime

class Poll(models.Model):
    question = models.CharField(max_length=200)
    pub_date = models.DateTimeField('date published')
    def was_published_today(self):
        return self.pub_date.date() ==datetime.date.today()
    def __unicode__(self):
    return self.question

class Choice(models.Model):
    poll = models.ForeignKey(Poll)
    choice = models.CharField(max_length=200)
    votes = models.IntegerField()
    def __unicode__(self):
        return self.choice

Answer 1

Must be caused by mixed tab/space indentation…

Your code pasted in the comment was messed up but I had a look at the HTML source code and found that the lines you typed in (around the __unicode__ methods, specifically) were indented using mixed tabs/spaces. Maybe you’re using an editor where you configured the “tab width” to be 4 so that the a tab indentation level looks the same as 4 spaces. However the python interpreter considers a tab equivalent as 8 spaces (two indent levels). So the lines you typed (or lines with tabs) are wrongly indented.

Here I mark all the tabs in your code with “<T>“

from django.db import models

import datetime

class Poll(models.Model):
    question = models.CharField(max_length=200)
    pub_date = models.DateTimeField('date published')
    def was_published_today(self):
    <T> return self.pub_date.date() ==datetime.date.today()
<T> def __unicode__(self):
<T> <T> return self.question

class Choice(models.Model):
    poll = models.ForeignKey(Poll)
    choice = models.CharField(max_length=200)
    votes = models.IntegerField()
    def __unicode__(self):
<T> <T> return self.choice

NEVER mix tabs and spaces, in any language. And in Python we always use 4 spaces to indent as recommended by PEP-8.

Whatever editor you use, google for how to configure it to automatically expand tabs into 4 spaces.