DeprecationWarning: Non-ASCII character '\xf3'

[Benjamin Niemann]

jau wrote:

> Hi co-listers!
> 
> I have been off Python for 2 years and now, that i'm used to Eclipse and
> Java, I decided to start a project with Python to refresh skills this
> time using Eclipse and TrueStudio. But now, two things can be occured
> since the last time i used it.
> 
> the first one, something concerning to the encoding has changed and i
> haven't noticed it.
> 
> the other one, when using Python from Eclipse i have to add any special
> config lines at the begining of my Python files.
> 
> if i have this hello world python "program" (i have to call it by
> someway, hahaha)
> 
> print "hello world"
> 
> i get this output
> 
> hello world
> sys:1: DeprecationWarning: Non-ASCII character '\xf3' in file
> C:\Workspace\J&J\src\es\jau\main.py on line 2, but no encoding declared;
> see http://www.python.org/peps/pep-0263.html for details
>
> the article mentioned above didn't explain so much for me.
> 
> i doesn't look to be an error, but curiosity is bitting me... what's
> really happening here? Do I need to do any special thing to avoid this?

The single print statement above should not trigger this warning. Are there
any non-ASCII character in the file (perhaps comments?).
If you use non-ASCII characters in python source files, you have to tell the
interpreter which encoding you are using - otherwise funny things will
happen. You have to find out which encoding Eclipse uses to save file
(looks like iso-8859-1) and add the line

# -*- coding: iso-8859-1 -*-

at the top of the file.

Python does not make any assumptions about the encoding beyond US-ASCII
(perhaps it does, but it does not encourage taking advantage of this) - if
you use anything else, then you'll have to declare it.

This will be important, if you use unicode strings:

u"stränge characters"

Python must know the encoding of the file in order to decode the string
literal into an unicode string.

-- 
Benjamin Niemann
Email: pink at odahoda dot de
WWW: http://www.odahoda.de/