Looking for an appropriate encoding standard that supports all languages

[ata.jaf]

On Aug 19, 11:48 am, Steven D'Aprano <steve-REMOVE-
T... at cybersource.com.au> wrote:
> On Thu, 19 Aug 2010 01:29:51 -0700, ata.jaf wrote:
> > On Aug 17, 11:55 pm, Thomas Jollans <tho... at jollybox.de> wrote:
> >> On Tuesday 17 August 2010, it occurred to ata.jaf to exclaim:
>
> >> > I am developing a little program in Mac with wxPython. But I have
> >> > problems with the characters that are not in ASCII. Like some special
> >> > characters in French or Turkish. So I am looking for a way to solve
> >> > this. Like an encoding standard that supports all languages. Or some
> >> > other way.
>
> >> Anything that supports all of Unicode will do. Like UTF-8. If your text
> >> is mostly Latin, then just go for UTF-8, if you use other alphabets
> >> extensively, you might want to consider UTF-16, which might the use a
> >> little less space.
>
> > OK, I used UTF-8.
> > I write a line of strings in the source code
>
> Do you have a source code encoding line at the start of your script?
>
> http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0263/
>
> > and I want my program to
> > show that as an output on GUI. And this line of strings includes a
> > character like "ü". But I see that in GUI this character is replaced
> > with another strange characters. I mean it doesn't work. And when I try
> > to use UTF-16, I get an syntax error that declares "UTF-16 stream does
> > not start with BOM".
>
> What GUI are you using?
>
> Please COPY AND PASTE (do not retype) the EXACT error message you get,
> including the entire traceback.
>
> --
> Steven

Yes I have a source code encoding line.
Here it is:


# -*- coding: utf_16 -*-


I am using WxPython.

And the error that I get about using utf-16 is:\



Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
  File "z.py", line 2
SyntaxError: UTF-16 stream does not start with BOM