UTF8 characters in Django source code

Question

I have some accented characters in my Python source code (comments, strings), and Django gives me an error for those characters.

I have to put this line at the top of the Python file to make it work:

# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-

Is there a way to globally allow UTF8 in the whole project?

You could upgrade to python 3, you'll need to anyway for django 2.0 — Sayse
– Sayse, Commented Dec 9, 2016 at 11:02
Check this out https://code.djangoproject.com/wiki/GlobalState — Piyush S. Wanare
– Piyush S. Wanare, Commented Dec 9, 2016 at 11:05

Zero Piraeus · Accepted Answer · 2016-12-09 11:07:09Z

2

In Python 2, source files are interpreted as ASCII by default, unless a coding declaration like the one in your question appears at the top of the file.

In Python 3, source files are interpreted as UTF-8 by default (again, unless a coding declaration specifies some other encoding).

Information on the history of this change can be found in PEP 3120: Using UTF-8 as the default source encoding.

There's no other way to force Python to interpret a source file as an encoding other than the default.

So, you have two choices:

Add the coding declaration to every source file which includes non-ASCII characters.
Switch to Python 3.

Option 2 is by far the better choice, and will save you a lot of headache in the long run.

answered Dec 9, 2016 at 11:07

Zero Piraeus

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