SyntaxError Non-ASCII character xa3 in file when function returns

Question

Say I have a function   def NewFunction        return        I want to print some stuff with a pound sign in front of it and it prints an error when I try to run this program  this error message is displayed   SyntaxError  Non-ASCII character   xa3  in file  blah  but no encoding declared  see http   www python org peps pep-0263 html for details   Can anyone inform me how I can include a pound sign in my return function  I m basically using it in a class and it s within the    str    part that the pound sign is included

User · Answer

You re probably trying to run Python 3 file with Python 2 interpreter  Currently  as of 2019   python command defaults to Python 2 when both versions are installed  on Windows and most Linux distributions   But in case you re indeed working on a Python 2 script  a not yet mentioned on this page solution is to resave the file in UTF-8 BOM encoding  that will add three special bytes to the start of the file  they will explicitly inform the Python interpreter  and your text editor  about the file encoding

User · Answer

First add the   - - coding  utf-8 - - line to the beginning of the file and then use u foo  for all your non-ASCII unicode data   def NewFunction        return u       or use the magic available since Python 2 6 to make it automatic   from   future   import unicode literals

User · Answer

I d recommend reading that PEP the error gives you   The problem is that your code is trying to use the ASCII encoding  but the pound symbol is not an ASCII character   Try using UTF-8 encoding   You can start by putting   - - coding  utf-8 - - at the top of your  py file   To get more advanced  you can also define encodings on a string by string basis in your code   However  if you are trying to put the pound sign literal in to your code  you ll need an encoding that supports it for the entire file

User · Answer

Adding the following two lines in the script solved the issue for me       usr bin python   coding utf-8   Hope it helps

User · Answer

The error message tells you exactly what s wrong  The Python interpreter needs to know the encoding of the non-ASCII character   If you want to return U 00A3 then you can say  return u  u00a3    which represents this character in pure ASCII by way of a Unicode escape sequence   If you want to return a byte string containing the literal byte 0xA3  that s  return b  xa3     where in Python 2 the b is implicit  but explicit is better than implicit    The linked PEP in the error message instructs you exactly how to tell Python  this file is not pure ASCII  here s the encoding I m using    If the encoding is UTF-8  that would be    coding utf-8   or the Emacs-compatible    - - encoding  utf-8 - -   If you don t know which encoding your editor uses to save this file  examine it with something like a hex editor and some googling   The Stack Overflow character-encoding tag has a tag info page with more information and some troubleshooting tips   In so many words  outside of the 7-bit ASCII range  0x00-0x7F   Python can t and mustn t guess what string a sequence of bytes represents  https   tripleee github io 8bit a3 shows 21 possible interpretations for the byte 0xA3 and that s only from the legacy 8-bit encodings  but it could also very well be the first byte of a multi-byte encoding  But in fact  I would guess you are actually using Latin-1  so you should have    coding  latin-1   as the first or second line of your source file   Anyway  without knowledge of which character the byte is supposed to represent  a human would not be able to guess this  either   A caveat  coding  latin-1 will definitely remove the error message  because there are no byte sequences which are not technically permitted in this encoding   but might produce completely the wrong result when the code is interpreted if the actual encoding is something else  You really have to know the encoding of the file with complete certainty when you declare the encoding

User · Answer

Adding the following two lines at the top of my  py script worked for me  first line was necessary      usr bin env python   - - coding  utf-8 - -

[python] SyntaxError: Non-ASCII character '\xa3' in file when function returns '£'

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