Defining unicode variables in Python

Question

Recently, I have been reading about the Python source code encoding, especially PEP 263 and PEP 3120.

I have the following code:

# coding:utf-8

s =          


        

Answer 1

No, Python 2 only supports ASCII names. From the language reference:

identifier ::=  (letter|”_”) (letter | digit | “_”)*
letter     ::=  lowercase | uppercase
lowercase  ::=  “a”…”z”
uppercase  ::=  “A”…”Z”
digit      ::=  “0”…”9”

Compared that the much longer Python 3 version, which does have full Unicode names.

The practical problem the PEPs solve is that before, if a byte over 127 appeared in a source file (say inside a unicode string), then Python had no way of knowing which character was meant by that as it could have been any encoding. Now it's interpreted as UTF-8 by default, and can be changed by adding such a header.