Django SyntaxError at / Non-ASCII character '\xe6' in file

Question

I am getting this error:

SyntaxError at /
Non-ASCII character '\xe6' in file

pointed to my forms.py file which has some chinese characters

I have to put # -*- coding: utf-8 -*- at the start the forms.py file before it would work

I thought Django handles everything in unicode? What's wrong?

Answer 1

Nothing is wrong. You have done the correct thing. If you want to use non-ASCII characters in your code, you need to tell Python what encoding you are using.

This has nothing to do with Django, or Unicode.