South migration to convert tables to utf-8

convert_utf8.py

from django.db.models import get_app, get_models
from django.conf import settings
from south.db import db
from south.v2 import SchemaMigration


class Migration(SchemaMigration):
    """
    This is a generic migration to convert tables and column from latin-1 to utf-8
    To use it create an empty migration: 
        $ python manage.py schemamigration app_name migration_name --empty
    Then replace the forward and backward methods with this class mehtods.
    """
    # This application tables
    tables = [model._meta.db_table for model in get_models(get_app(settings.RESOURCE_NAME))]
        
    # To do the conversion on all the DB tables
    # from django.db import connection
    # cursor = connection.cursor()
    # tables = connection.introspection.table_names()

    def forwards(self, orm):

        for table in self.tables:
            db.execute("ALTER TABLE %s CONVERT TO CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_unicode_ci;" % table)

    def backwards(self, orm):

        for table in self.tables:
            db.execute("ALTER TABLE %s CONVERT TO CHARACTER SET latin1 COLLATE latin1_swedish_ci;" % table)