forms.Field.required

Field.required

By default, each Field class assumes the value is required, so if you pass an empty value – either None or the empty string ("") – then clean() will raise a ValidationError exception:

>>> from django import forms
>>> f = forms.CharField()
>>> f.clean('foo')
'foo'
>>> f.clean('')
Traceback (most recent call last):
...
ValidationError: ['This field is required.']
>>> f.clean(None)
Traceback (most recent call last):
...
ValidationError: ['This field is required.']
>>> f.clean(' ')
' '
>>> f.clean(0)
'0'
>>> f.clean(True)
'True'
>>> f.clean(False)
'False'

To specify that a field is not required, pass required=False to the Field constructor:

>>> f = forms.CharField(required=False)
>>> f.clean('foo')
'foo'
>>> f.clean('')
''
>>> f.clean(None)
''
>>> f.clean(0)
'0'
>>> f.clean(True)
'True'
>>> f.clean(False)
'False'

If a Field has required=False and you pass clean() an empty value, then clean() will return a normalized empty value rather than raising ValidationError. For CharField, this will be a Unicode empty string. For other Field classes, it might be None. (This varies from field to field.)