Django TextField and CharField is stripping spaces and blank lines - django

Question

I just researched my "bug" and it turned out to be a new feature in Django 1.9 that CharFields strip spaces by default :
https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.9/ref/forms/fields/#django.forms.CharField.strip
The same seams to apply to text fields TextField.
So I found out why Django suddenly behaves differently than before, but is there an easy way to restore the previous default for auto generated admin forms?
I would like to NOT strip spaces while still using the auto generated form from the admin. Is that still possible?

Answer 1

If you are looking for a text/char field and do not want it to strip white spaces you can set strip=False in the constructor method of a form and then use the form in the admin
class YourForm(forms.ModelForm):
def __init__(self, *args, **kwargs):
super(YourForm, self).__init__(*args, **kwargs)
self.fields['myfield'].strip = False
class Meta:
model = YourModel
fields = "__all__"
You can then use this form in the admin by specifying form=YourForm in the admin.py file.

Answer 2

Try using this:
# fields.py
from django.db.models import TextField
class NonStrippingTextField(TextField):
"""A TextField that does not strip whitespace at the beginning/end of
it's value. Might be important for markup/code."""
def formfield(self, **kwargs):
kwargs['strip'] = False
return super(NonStrippingTextField, self).formfield(**kwargs)
And in your model:
class MyModel(models.Model):
# ...
my_field = NonStrippingTextField()

Answer 3

strip=False
in the model field for CharFields.
Django TextField do not support this stripping feature so you have to do it on your own. You can use the strip method.
abc.strip()

Answer 4

Seems like the best way to handle this is to create a custom admin form like this:
class CustomForm(forms.ModelForm):
my_field = forms.CharField(strip=False, widget=forms.Textarea)
class Meta:
model = MyModel
exclude = []
This will create a default form with just my_field overwritten with its non stripped version. )this has to be set in the corresponding admin of course. If anybody knows an even simpler version. Please tell me!

Answer 5

You can also achieve this by modifying ModelAdmin.
Overridding formfield_for_dbfield function and setting kwargs['strip'] = False for title field will disable auto trim for it.
#admin.register(Example)
class ExampleAdmin(admin.ModelAdmin):
def formfield_for_dbfield(self, db_field, request, **kwargs):
if db_field.name == 'title':
kwargs['strip'] = False
return super().formfield_for_dbfield(db_field, request, **kwargs)
Ref: https://www.aaronoellis.com/articles/allow-whitespace-to-be-a-valid-charfield-value-in-django-admin

Answer 6

I was having this issue with django-rest model serializer. The data in my text field was stripped of white space. So if you are trying to do this on the serializer level, you can specify the whitespace param on CharField serializer. Here is the source code signature.
And here is the rest-docs on CharField
class SomeSerializer(serializers.ModelSerializer):
content = serializers.CharField(trim_whitespace=False)
class Meta:
model = YourModel
fields = ["content"]