What is the common header format of Python files?

Question

I came across the following header format for Python source files in a document about Python coding guidelines:

#!/usr/bin/env python

\"\"\"Foobar.py: Descr         


        

Answer 1

The answers above are really complete, but if you want a quick and dirty header to copy'n paste, use this:

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

"""Module documentation goes here
   and here
   and ...
"""

Why this is a good one:

• The first line is for *nix users. It will choose the Python interpreter in the user path, so will automatically choose the user preferred interpreter.
• The second one is the file encoding. Nowadays every file must have a encoding associated. UTF-8 will work everywhere. Just legacy projects would use other encoding.
• And a very simple documentation. It can fill multiple lines.

See also: https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0263/

If you just write a class in each file, you don't even need the documentation (it would go inside the class doc).