Latin1/UTF-8 Encoding Problems in AngularJS - django

Question

I have a Python 2.7 Django + AngularJS app. There's an input field that feeds into the data model and the data is sent to the server using Angular's $http. When the input field contains the character "é", Django doesn't like it. When I use "★é" Django has no problem with it. It seems to me that the star character being outside the latin1 charset forces the encoding to utf-8, while when the only non-latin character is "é", Angular sends the data as latin1, which confuses my python code.
The error message from Django is:
UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf8' codec can't decode byte 0xe9 in position 0: invalid continuation byte
Telling the simplejson.loads() function on the server to read the data using the ISO-8859-1 (latin1) encoding worked fine when my input string contained just the é in it and no star, so that proves that the data coming from the browser is latin1 unless forced to utf-8 by non-latin1 characters, like the star.
Is there a way to tell Angular to always send data using utf-8?
The Angular code that sends the data to the server:
$http({
url: $scope.dataUrl,
method: 'POST',
data: JSON.stringify({recipe: recipe}),
headers: {'Content-Type': 'application/json'}
}).success(...).error(...);
The Django code that reads the data:
recipe = simplejson.loads(request.raw_post_data)['recipe']

Answer 1

I found one way that works, using the transformRequest config parameter.
transformRequest: function (data, headersGetter) {
return encode_utf8(JSON.stringify(data));
}
function encode_utf8(s) {
return unescape(encodeURIComponent(s));
}
I'm using the encode function found and explained at http://ecmanaut.blogspot.com/2006/07/encoding-decoding-utf8-in-javascript.html and the JSON library found at http://www.JSON.org/json2.js.