utf-8 encoding works in iPython console, not in Spyder editor

Question

here is the minimal test. in Spyder Editor, I wrote these 4 lines (nothing else)

# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
import sys
print(sys.getdefaultencoding() )
print(u"µ")

I get:

utf-8
µ

but if I just copy-paste the 2 lines in iPython console, I get

what's wrong with my.py file or with spyder Editor?

Answer 1

what's wrong with my.py file or with spyder Editor?

The problem is most likely that you're using Windows and the console interprets your output as Windows-1252 (the default console encoding for western european windows):

>>> 'µ'.encode('utf-8').decode('windows-1252')
'µ'

It's not clear whether the first snippet is the spyder console or a normal python shell in the windows console.

 print(sys.getdefaultencoding() )

has literally nothing to do with anything. sys.getdefaultencoding() is the internal python encoding.

You can try to mess with PYTHONIOENCODING , or see what locale.getpreferredencoding() returns.

Answer 2

I solved the problem, thanks to @Carlos Cordoba (Spyder's master).

I opened the file in notepad++ , and converted it into " UTF-8 BOM " (it was in UTF-8 but without BOM)

Now it works