Unicode formatting for Strings

[Chris Mellon]

On 2/5/07, Kent Johnson <kent at kentsjohnson.com> wrote:
> robson.cozendey.rj at gmail.com wrote:
> > Hi,
> >
> > I´m trying desperately to tell the interpreter to put an 'á' in my
> > string, so here is the code snippet:
> >
> > # -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
> > filename = u"Ataris Aquáticos #2.txt"
> > f = open(filename, 'w')
> >
> > Then I save it with Windows Notepad, in the UTF-8 format. So:
> >
> > 1) I put the "magic comment" at the start of the file
> > 2) I write u"" to specify my unicode string
> > 3) I save it in the UTF-8 format
> >
> > And even so, I get an error!
> >
> >   File "Ataris Aqußticos #2.py", line 1
> > SyntaxError: Non-ASCII character '\xff' in file Ataris Aqußticos #2.py
> > on line 1
>
> It looks like you are saving the file in Unicode format (not utf-8) and
> Python is choking on the Byte Order Mark that Notepad puts at the
> beginning of the document.
>

Notepad does support saving to UTF-8, and I was able to do this
without the problem the OP was having. I also saved both with and
without a BOM (in UTF-8) using SciTe, and Python worked correctly in
both cases.

> Try using an editor that will save utf-8 without a BOM, e.g. jedit or
> TextPad.
>
> Kent
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