When to use utf8 as a header in py files

Question

Some source files, from downloaded code, have the following header

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

I have an idea what utf-8 encoding is but why would

Answer 1

Always use UTF-8 and make sure your editor also uses UTF-8. Start your Python script like this if you use Python 27:

#!/usr/bin/env python
# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
from __future__ import unicode_literals

This is a good blog post from Nick Johnson about Python and UTF-8:

http://blog.notdot.net/2010/07/Getting-unicode-right-in-Python By the way, this post was written before he could use:

from __future__ import unicode_literals