Python : Fix SyntaxError: Non-ASCII character in file, but no encoding declared

Don't really know why Python couldn't handle non-ASCII characters in the source code well by default. Encounter a syntax error in while trying to print out some non-ASCII characters ( Chinese ) with Python.

chinese.py

 print " 我爱你"

> python chinese.py

The interpreter throws out this error message :

File "utf8.py", line 1 SyntaxError: Non-ASCII character '\xe6' in file utf8.py on line 1, but no encoding declared; see http://python.org/dev/peps/pep-0263/ for details

To fix, this problem. Include this line at the beginning of the your Python source code.

# - *- coding: utf- 8 - *-

After modification :

 # - *- coding: utf- 8 - *-
 print " 我爱你"

and now > python chinese.py should print out :

我爱你

Hope this helps!