Python Windows release and encoding

[Peter Otten]

Absalom K. wrote:

> Hi, I am working on Linux; a friend of mine sends to me python files from
> his Windows release. He uses the editor coming with the release; he runs
> his code from the editor by using a menu (or some F5 key I think).
> 
> He doesn't declare any encoding in his source file; when I want to try
> his code, I have an error since he obviously uses non-ascii characters.
> As far as I can see, he uses utf8 without knowing it. I add the UTF8
> declaration, run the code, and everything is fine.
> 
> Then I tell him to add the utf-8 declaration; but now he has an error
> when running his file from the Windows editor.
> 
> Finally, he told me he could run the file by declaring the latin-1
> encoding.
> 
> But I want to understand exactly:
>   a) what is the encoding used by the editor coming in the Windows
>   release? b) why doesn't he need to declare the encoding (I need it on
>   Linux for
>      the very same files)?
> 
> Best regards, ak.

Your friend may be using an old version of Python. Quoting

<http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0263/>

"""
    For backwards-compatibility with existing code which currently
    uses non-ASCII in string literals without declaring an encoding,
    the implementation will be introduced in two phases:

    1. Allow non-ASCII in string literals and comments, by internally
       treating a missing encoding declaration as a declaration of
       "iso-8859-1". This will cause arbitrary byte strings to
       correctly round-trip between step 2 and step 5 of the
       processing, and provide compatibility with Python 2.2 for
       Unicode literals that contain non-ASCII bytes.

       A warning will be issued if non-ASCII bytes are found in the
       input, once per improperly encoded input file.

    2. Remove the warning, and change the default encoding to "ascii".

    [...]

    Implementation of steps 1 and 2 above were completed in 2.3,
    except for changing the default encoding to "ascii".

    The default encoding was set to "ascii" in version 2.5.
 """