Non-ASCII character error using nltk in Python

Question

I'm trying to use the solution code given in the following link: Unicode Tagging in Python NLTK

In the solution given by omerbp :

from nltk.corpus import indian
from nltk.tag import tnt

train_data = indian.tagged_sents('hindi.pos')
tnt_pos_tagger = tnt.TnT()
tnt_pos_tagger.train(train_data) #Training the tnt Part of speech tagger with hindi data

print tnt_pos_tagger.tag(nltk.word_tokenize(word_to_be_tagged))

I'm getting the following error:

'SyntaxError: Non-ASCII character '\\xe0' in file q12.py on line 1, but no encoding declared; see http://www.python.org/peps/pep-0263.html for details' in line 1.

Answer 1

Add these two lines on the top of your file:

#!/usr/bin/python
# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-

They will instruct the interpreter to encode every charater as UTF-8 instead of ASCII.