A source file with unicode characters is making Django throw up a SyntaxError exception

Question

A file in UTF-8 encoding has an è character (e with accent grave) embedded in comment delimiters for Python. Django complains about this character and will not render the page. How can I resolve this?

Answer 1

The SyntaxError Django is raising already points you in the right direction.

It is always a good thing to actually read exceptions. In your case, it will have said something along the lines of

Non-ASCII character '\xc3' in file /home/zakx/../views.py on line 84, but no encoding declared; see http://www.python.org/peps/pep-0263.html for details (views.py, line 84)

If you'd then read PEP-0263, you could learn that there are some ways to tell Python (and your editor!) which encoding your files are in. Generally, you will want to use UTF-8 encoding whenever possible. Therefore, writing one of the following lines into the first line (or second, if you use a shebang) will tell Python to use UTF-8 for that file.

# coding=utf8
# -*- coding: utf8 -*-
# vim: set fileencoding=utf8 :

Answer 2

Did you try adding the coding header to the file? On the first line, possibly after the shebang line, add

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