Why declare unicode by string in python?

Question

I\'m still learning python and I have a doubt:

In python 2.6.x I usually declare encoding in the file header like this (as in PEP 0263)

# -*- coding:         


        

Answer 1

The header definition is to define the encoding of the code itself, not the resulting strings at runtime.

putting a non-ascii character like ۲ in the python script without the utf-8 header definition will throw a warning