Compile Syntax Error: non ASCII letters in a string

Question

I have a python file that contains a long string of HTML. When I compile & run this file/script I get this error:

_SyntaxError: Non-ASCII character '\x92' in file   C:\Users...\GlobalVars.py on line 2509,   but no encoding declared; see http://www.python.org/peps/pep-0263.html for details_

I have followed the instructions and gone to the url suggested. But putting something like this at the top of my script still doesn't work:

#!/usr/bin/python
# -*- coding: latin-1 -*-

What do you think I can do to stop this compiler error from occuring?

Answer 1

First, in order to prevent problems like the one specified in the question you should not ever use other encoding than utf-8 for python source code.

This is the correct header to use

#! /usr/bin/env python
# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-

Now you have to convert the file from whatever encoding you may have to utf-8, probably your current text editor is able to do that.

If you wonder why I say this remember that it is impossible for a text editor to safely guess your non-unicode encoding because there is no BOM for non-unicode. For this reason most decent editors are using UTF-8 as default even when encoding is not specified. And BTW, the encoding specified in the python file header is for Python only, most editors ignore what you wrote there.

Also, as you can see Python is trying to decode a character above 128 using ASCII (not latin-1), this is supposed to fail. I am not sure why this happens but I don't even care too much because there is a much better way to solve the problem.

Answer 2

It must be at the top of the script that has the non-ASCII text, and it must match the actual encoding of the file. \x92 is CP1252, not Latin-1.