Using Unicode scripts

[yzzzzz]

Hi,

I am writing my python programs using a Unicode text editor. The files are
encoded in UTF-8. Python's default encoding seems to be Latin 1 (ISO-8859-1)
or maybe Windows-1252 (CP1252) which aren't compatible with UTF-8.

For example, if I type print "é", it prints é. If I use a unicode string:
a=u"é" and if I choose to encode it in UTF-8, I get 4 Latin 1 characters,
which makes sense if the interpreter thinks I typed in u"é".

How can I solve this problem?

Thank you

PS. I have no problem using Unicode strings in Python, I know how to
manipulate and convert them, I'm just looking for how to specify the default
encoding for the scripts I write.