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.