Non-ASCII Characters

You should avoid as much as possible putting non-ASCII characters in a source file. If you're using Emacs, you can use the following function to find non-ASCII characters. It is taken from the Emacs wiki:

;; Find non-ASCII characters in source files.
(defun non-ascii-char ()
  "Find the first non-ASCII character from point onwards."
  (interactive)
  (let (point)
    (save-excursion
      (setq point
            (catch 'non-ascii
              (while (not (eobp))
                (or (eq (char-charset (following-char))
                        'ascii)
                    (throw 'non-ascii (point)))
                (forward-char 1)))))
    (if point
        (goto-char point)
        (message "No non-ASCII characters."))))

Put the above function definition in your Emacs configuration file ~/.emacs. Then to use the function in an opened source file, do:

M-x non-ascii-char RET

There are situations where you need to use non-ASCII characters in source files. For example, you might want to acknowledge someone for their contribution or you want to put an author's name in a source file. The name might contain non-ASCII characters. In that case, put the following line at the top of the relevant source file:

# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-

Another case would be in doctesting functions that are meant to support unicode input, for example, in the notebook.

To use non-ASCII characters in .rst files, put the following at the very top of your .rst file:

.. -*- coding: utf-8 -*-