SyntaxError: Non-ASCII character '\xe4' in file today.py on line 2, but no encoding declared;

error detail: 

% python today.py
  File "today.py", line 2
SyntaxError: Non-ASCII character '\xe4' in file today.py on line 2, but no encoding declared; see http://python.org/dev/peps/pep-0263/ for details

solutions:

take UTF-8 as an example.

First:

#!/usr/bin/python
#coding:utf-8
from datetime import datetime
print(datetime.now().strftime('今天是%Y年%m月%d日'))

Second:

#!/usr/bin/python
#-*-coding:utf-8 -*-
from datetime import datetime
print(datetime.now().strftime('今天是%Y年%m月%d日'))

Third:

#!/usr/bin/python
#vim: set fileencoding:utf-8
from datetime import datetime

print(datetime.now().strftime('今天是%Y年%m月%d日'))

 Note: Python will default to ASCII as standard encoding if no other encoding hints are given.

To define a source code encoding, a magic comment must be placed into the source files either as first or second line in the file

 

references:

1. https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0263/

2. https://www.fatalerrors.org/a/syntaxerror-non-ascii-character-but-no-encoding-declared.html