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python utf-8 encoding declaration

é character belongs to utf-8 as shown in:
https://www.utf8-chartable.de/unicode-utf8-table.pl
As official documentation (https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0263/)
says:
'In Python 2.1, Unicode literals can only be written using the Latin-1 based encoding "unicode-escape"....'
I use Python 2.7.13
so in my code (as told in https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0263/), I have tried successively (after #!/usr/bin/python)
# coding=utf-8
# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
the last one also appears in the post solution Correct way to define Python source code encoding
but it still does not work:
SyntaxError: Non-ASCII character '\xc3' in file ./<file_name>.py on line 160, but no encoding declared; see http://python.org/dev/peps/pep-0263/ for details
Any ideas folks ?? thanx.

SyntaxError: Non-ASCII character - Scrapy [duplicate]

Say I have a function:
def NewFunction():
return '£'
I want to print some stuff with a pound sign in front of it and it prints an error when I try to run this program, this error message is displayed:
SyntaxError: Non-ASCII character '\xa3' in file 'blah' but no encoding declared;
see http://www.python.org/peps/pep-0263.html for details
Can anyone inform me how I can include a pound sign in my return function? I'm basically using it in a class and it's within the '__str__' part that the pound sign is included.

I'd recommend reading that PEP the error gives you. The problem is that your code is trying to use the ASCII encoding, but the pound symbol is not an ASCII character. Try using UTF-8 encoding. You can start by putting # -*- coding: utf-8 -*- at the top of your .py file. To get more advanced, you can also define encodings on a string by string basis in your code. However, if you are trying to put the pound sign literal in to your code, you'll need an encoding that supports it for the entire file.

Adding the following two lines at the top of my .py script worked for me (first line was necessary):
#!/usr/bin/env python
# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-

First add the # -*- coding: utf-8 -*- line to the beginning of the file and then use u'foo' for all your non-ASCII unicode data:
def NewFunction():
return u'£'
or use the magic available since Python 2.6 to make it automatic:
from __future__ import unicode_literals

The error message tells you exactly what's wrong. The Python interpreter needs to know the encoding of the non-ASCII character.
If you want to return U+00A3 then you can say
return u'\u00a3'
which represents this character in pure ASCII by way of a Unicode escape sequence. If you want to return a byte string containing the literal byte 0xA3, that's
return b'\xa3'
(where in Python 2 the b is implicit; but explicit is better than implicit).
The linked PEP in the error message instructs you exactly how to tell Python "this file is not pure ASCII; here's the encoding I'm using". If the encoding is UTF-8, that would be
# coding=utf-8
or the Emacs-compatible
# -*- encoding: utf-8 -*-
If you don't know which encoding your editor uses to save this file, examine it with something like a hex editor and some googling. The Stack Overflow character-encoding tag has a tag info page with more information and some troubleshooting tips.
In so many words, outside of the 7-bit ASCII range (0x00-0x7F), Python can't and mustn't guess what string a sequence of bytes represents. https://tripleee.github.io/8bit#a3 shows 21 possible interpretations for the byte 0xA3 and that's only from the legacy 8-bit encodings; but it could also very well be the first byte of a multi-byte encoding. But in fact, I would guess you are actually using Latin-1, so you should have
# coding: latin-1
as the first or second line of your source file. Anyway, without knowledge of which character the byte is supposed to represent, a human would not be able to guess this, either.
A caveat: coding: latin-1 will definitely remove the error message (because there are no byte sequences which are not technically permitted in this encoding), but might produce completely the wrong result when the code is interpreted if the actual encoding is something else. You really have to know the encoding of the file with complete certainty when you declare the encoding.

Adding the following two lines in the script solved the issue for me.
# !/usr/bin/python
# coding=utf-8
Hope it helps !

You're probably trying to run Python 3 file with Python 2 interpreter. Currently (as of 2019), python command defaults to Python 2 when both versions are installed, on Windows and most Linux distributions.
But in case you're indeed working on a Python 2 script, a not yet mentioned on this page solution is to resave the file in UTF-8+BOM encoding, that will add three special bytes to the start of the file, they will explicitly inform the Python interpreter (and your text editor) about the file encoding.

Python unicode string literals in module declared as utf-8

I have a dummie Python module with the utf-8 header that looks like this:
# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
a = "á"
print type(a), a
Which prints:
<type 'str'> á
But I thought that all string literals inside a Python module declared as utf-8 whould automatically be of type unicode, intead of str. Am I missing something or is this the correct behaviour?
In order to get a as an unicode string I use:
a = u"á"
But this doesn't seem very "polite", nor practical. Is there a better option?

# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
doesn't make the string literals Unicode. Take this example, I have a file with an Arabic comment and string, file is utf-8:
# هذا تعليق عربي
print type('نص عربي')
if I run it it will throw a SyntaxError exception:
SyntaxError: Non-ASCII character '\xd9' in file file.py
on line 2, but no encoding declared;
see http://www.python.org/peps/pep-0263.html for details
so to allow this I have to add that line to tell the interpreter that the file is UTF-8 encoded:
# -*-coding: utf-8 -*-
# هذا تعليق عربي
print type('نص عربي')
now it runs fine but it still prints <type 'str'> unless I make the string Unicode:
# -*-coding: utf-8 -*-
# هذا تعليق عربي
print type(u'نص عربي')

No, the codec at the top only informs Python how to interpret the source code, and uses that codec to interpret Unicode literals. It does not turn literal bytestrings into unicode values. As PEP 263 states:
This PEP proposes to introduce a syntax to declare the encoding of
a Python source file. The encoding information is then used by the
Python parser to interpret the file using the given encoding. Most
notably this enhances the interpretation of Unicode literals in
the source code and makes it possible to write Unicode literals
using e.g. UTF-8 directly in an Unicode aware editor.
Emphasis mine.
Without the codec declaration, Python has no idea how to interpret non-ASCII characters:
$ cat /tmp/test.py
example = '☃'
$ python2.7 /tmp/test.py
File "/tmp/test.py", line 1
SyntaxError: Non-ASCII character '\xe2' in file /tmp/test.py on line 1, but no encoding declared; see http://www.python.org/peps/pep-0263.html for details
If Python behaved the way you expect it to, you would not be able to literal bytestring values that contain non-ASCII byte values either.
If your terminal is configured to display UTF-8 values, then printing a UTF-8 encoded byte string will look 'correct', but only by virtue of luck that the encodings match.
The correct way to get unicode values, is by using unicode literals or by otherwise producing unicode (decoding from byte strings, converting integer codepoints to unicode characters, etc.):
unicode_snowman = '\xe2\x98\x83'.decode('utf8')
unicode_snowman = unichr(0x2603)
In Python 3, the codec also applies to how variable names are interpreted, as you can use letters and digits outside of the ASCII range in names. The default codec in Python 3 is UTF-8, as opposed to ASCII in Python 2.

No this is just source code encoding. Please see http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0263/
To define a source code encoding, a magic comment must
be placed into the source files either as first or second
line in the file, such as:
# coding=<encoding name>
or (using formats recognized by popular editors)
#!/usr/bin/python
# -*- coding: <encoding name> -*-
or
#!/usr/bin/python
# vim: set fileencoding=<encoding name> :
This doesn't make all literals unicode just point how unicode literals should be decoded.
One should use unicode function or u prefix to set literal as unicode.
N.B. in python3 all strings are unicode.

Using urlencode for Devanagari text

The following code:
import simplejson,urllib,urllib2
query=[u'नेपाल']
urlbase="http://search.twitter.com/search.json"
values={'q':query[0]}
data=urllib.urlencode(values)
req=urllib2.Request(urlbase,data)
response=urllib2.urlopen(req)
json=simplejson.load(response)
print json
throws exception:
SyntaxError: Non-ASCII character '\xe0' in file ques.py on line 3, but no encoding declared; see http://www.python.org/peps/pep-0263.html for details
The code works if query contains standard ASCII characters. I tried looking at the suggested link but couldn't figure out how to specify encoding for Devanagari characters.

You need to add the UTF-8 header to your file to tell the Python interpreter that there are unicode literals. You also have to encode the parameters as UTF-8. Here's a working version:
# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
import simplejson,urllib,urllib2
query=[u'नेपाल']
urlbase="http://search.twitter.com/search.json"
values={'q':query[0].encode('utf-8')}
data=urllib.urlencode(values)
req=urllib2.Request(urlbase,data)
response=urllib2.urlopen(req)
json=simplejson.load(response)
print json

Hebrew characters in Python code on eclipse

I'm writing python code on eclipse and whenver I use hebrew characters I get the following syntax error:
SyntaxError: Non-ASCII character '\xfa' in file ... on line 66, but no encoding declared; see http://www.python.org/peps/pep-0263.html for details
How do I declare unicode/utf-8 encoding?
I tried adding
-*- coding: Unicode -*-
or
-*- coding: utf-8 -*-
in the commented section in the beginnning of the py file. It didn't work.
I'm running eclipse with pydev, python 2.6 on windows 7.

I tried it also and here is my conclusion:
You should add
# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
at the very first line in your file.
And yes, I work with windows...
If I got it right, you are missing the #

Ensure that the encoding the editor is using to enter data matches the declared encoding in the file metadata.
This isn't something unique to Eclipse or Python; it applies to all character data formats and text editors.
Python has a number of options for dealing with string literals in both the str and unicode types via escape sequences. I believe there were changes to string literals between Python 2 and 3.
Python 2.7 string literals
Python 3.2 string literals

I had the same thing and it was because I'd tried to do:
a='言語版の記事'
When I should have done:
a=u'言語版の記事'
I think it's python/pydev complaining when trying to parse the source, rather than eclipse as such.

"Unicode" is certainly wrong, and \xfa is not UTF-8. Figure out which encoding is actually being used and declare that instead.