__unicode__() works, unicode() blows up. (Never mind!)

[Roy Smith]

In article <roy-90D9A2.08321804112012 at news.panix.com>,
 Roy Smith <roy at panix.com> wrote:

> >>> print u.__unicode__()
> None
> 
> >>> print unicode(u)
> Traceback (most recent call last):
>   File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
> TypeError: coercing to Unicode: need string or buffer, NoneType found
> 
> What's going on here?  I thought 
> (http://docs.python.org/2/library/functions.html#unicode) the latter two 
> calls should be identical, but obviously they're not.

Why is it, that no matter how long you stare at a problem, the answer 
comes to you moments after you hit the Post button? :-)

The problem is that __unicode__() is supposed to return a Unicode 
object, and unicode() enforces that.  The fix is to change:

    def __unicode__(self):
        return self.username

to be:

    def __unicode__(self):
        return unicode(self.username)

This never got noticed before because normally, self.username already is 
a unicode string, so it just works.