Where does this come from - - coding utf-8 - -

Question

Python recognizes the following as instruction which defines file s encoding     - - coding  utf-8 - -   I definitely saw this kind of instructions before  - - var  value - -   Where does it come from  What is the full specification  e g  can the value include spaces  special symbols  newlines  even - - itself   My program will be writing plain text files and I d like to include some metadata in them using this format

User · Answer

This is so called file local variables  that are understood by Emacs and set correspondingly   See corresponding section in Emacs manual - you can define them either in header or in footer of file

User · Answer

- - coding  utf-8 - - is a Python 2 thing  In Python 3   the default encoding of source files is already UTF-8 and that line is useless   See  Should I use encoding declaration in Python 3   pyupgrade is a tool you can run on your code to remove those comments and other no-longer-useful leftovers from Python 2  like having all your classes inherit from object

User · Answer

This way of specifying the encoding of a Python file comes from PEP 0263 - Defining Python Source Code Encodings   It is also recognized by GNU Emacs  see Python Language Reference  2 1 4 Encoding declarations   though I don t know if it was the first program to use that syntax

User · Answer

In PyCharm  I d leave it out  It turns off the UTF-8 indicator at the bottom with a warning that the encoding is hard-coded  Don t think you need the PyCharm comment mentioned above

[python] Where does this come from: -- coding: utf-8 --

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[python] Where does this come from: -*- coding: utf-8 -*-