django Unicode GET Parameter Values

I'm trying to get a GET parameter value that开发者_C百科 looks like this: http://someurl/handler.json?&q=%E1%F8%E0%F1%F8%E9

The q parameter in this case is Hebrew. I'm trying to read the value using the following code:

request.GET.get("q", None)

I'm getting gybrish instead of the correct text. Any idea what's wrong here? Am I missing some setting?

The query string is in ISO-8859-8, but Django's default encoding is UTF-8. You will have to change either DEFAULT_CHARSET or HttpRequest.encoding to ISO-8859-8 to get the correct Unicode data.