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| 55 | <H2><A NAME="SECTION004140000000000000000"></A><A NAME="encodings"></A> |
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| 58 | 2.1.4 Encoding declarations |
| 59 | </H2> |
| 60 | |
| 61 | <P> |
| 62 | If a comment in the first or second line of the Python script matches |
| 63 | the regular expression <tt class="regexp">coding[=:]\s*([-\w.]+)</tt>, this comment is |
| 64 | processed as an encoding declaration; the first group of this |
| 65 | expression names the encoding of the source code file. The recommended |
| 66 | forms of this expression are |
| 67 | |
| 68 | <P> |
| 69 | <div class="verbatim"><pre> |
| 70 | # -*- coding: <encoding-name> -*- |
| 71 | </pre></div> |
| 72 | |
| 73 | <P> |
| 74 | which is recognized also by GNU Emacs, and |
| 75 | |
| 76 | <P> |
| 77 | <div class="verbatim"><pre> |
| 78 | # vim:fileencoding=<encoding-name> |
| 79 | </pre></div> |
| 80 | |
| 81 | <P> |
| 82 | which is recognized by Bram Moolenaar's VIM. In addition, if the first |
| 83 | bytes of the file are the UTF-8 byte-order mark |
| 84 | (<code>'\xef\xbb\xbf'</code>), the declared file encoding is UTF-8 |
| 85 | (this is supported, among others, by Microsoft's <b class="program">notepad</b>). |
| 86 | |
| 87 | <P> |
| 88 | If an encoding is declared, the encoding name must be recognized by |
| 89 | Python. The encoding is used for all lexical analysis, in particular to find |
| 90 | the end of a string, and to interpret the contents of Unicode literals. |
| 91 | String literals are converted to Unicode for syntactical analysis, |
| 92 | then converted back to their original encoding before interpretation |
| 93 | starts. The encoding declaration must appear on a line of its own. |
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| 131 | <span class="release-info">Release 2.4.2, documentation updated on 28 September 2005.</span> |
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