Change text_factory in Django/sqlite
Incompatible Django version. Check Django version for solving this error first. I was running on Django==3.0.8 and it was producing an error. Than I ran virtualenv where I have Django==3.1.2 and the error was removed.
I have a django project that uses a sqlite database that can be written to by an external tool. The text is supposed to be UTF-8, but in some cases there will be errors in the encoding. The text is from an external source, so I cannot control the encoding. Yes, I know that I could write a "wrapping layer" between the external source and the database, but I prefer not having to do this, especially since the database already contains a lot of "bad" data.
The solution in sqlite is to change the text_factory to something like:

lambda x: unicode(x, "utf-8", "ignore")

However, I don't know how to tell the Django model driver this.
The exception I get is:

'Could not decode to UTF-8 column 'Text' with text'
in
/var/lib/python-support/python2.5/django/db/backends/sqlite3/base.py in execute

Somehow I need to tell the sqlite driver not to try to decode the text as UTF-8 (at least not using the standard algorithm, but it needs to use my fail-safe variant).