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UTF-8 is an encoding system for Unicode. It can translate any Unicode character to a matching unique binary string, and can also translate the binary string back to a Unicode character. This is the meaning of “UTF”, or “Unicode Transformation Format.”
UTF-8 is the most widely used way to represent Unicode text in web pages, and you should always use UTF-8 when creating your web pages and databases. But, in principle, UTF-8 is only one of the possible ways of encoding Unicode characters.
Text document that uses Unicode UTF-8 (8-bit Unicode Transformation Format) encoding; can be used for English and many other languages, including support for Asian characters; backwards compatible with ASCII.
Open the file in Notepad. Click 'Save As...'. In the 'Encoding:' combo box you will see the current file format. Yes, I opened the file in notepad and selected the UTF-8 format and saved it.
This way of specifying the encoding of a Python file comes from PEP 0263 - Defining Python Source Code Encodings.
It is also recognized by GNU Emacs (see Python Language Reference, 2.1.4 Encoding declarations), though I don't know if it was the first program to use that syntax.
# -*- coding: utf-8 -*- is a Python 2 thing. In Python 3+, the default encoding of source files is already UTF-8 and that line is useless.
See: Should I use encoding declaration in Python 3?
pyupgrade is a tool you can run on your code to remove those comments and other no-longer-useful leftovers from Python 2, like having all your classes inherit from object.
This is so called file local variables, that are understood by Emacs and set correspondingly. See corresponding section in Emacs manual - you can define them either in header or in footer of file
In PyCharm, I'd leave it out. It turns off the UTF-8 indicator at the bottom with a warning that the encoding is hard-coded. Don't think you need the PyCharm comment mentioned above.
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