Unicode formatting for Strings

[Kent Johnson]

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.

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

Kent