Antoine Pitrou added the comment:

Since the default source encoding in python2 is latin-1

Mmh, really? According to PEP 263: Python will default to ASCII as standard encoding if no other encoding hints are given. And indeed when trying Merlijn's code in a .py file rather than an eval() call, I get: SyntaxError: Non-ASCII character '\xc3' in file tcc.py on line 1, but no encoding declared; see http://www.python.org/peps/pep-0263.html for details ---------- components: +Interpreter Core -Documentation nosy: +benjamin.peterson, pitrou type: -> behavior _______________________________________ Python tracker <report@bugs.python.org> <http://bugs.python.org/issue18870> _______________________________________