How to accent in Python

Question

I’m writing a program and it keeps giving ascii error.
I’ve put this on the first line and nothing:

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

On request, follows edition explaining what is now.

now is variable for datetime and I believe it has no relation.

The accent on the console (terminal) is normal. What does not work is because I put to write in a file . txt and when put to write with accent that appears this error.

I did what mgibsonbr asked and gave everything ok. Use OS X.

So, by acting out:
- now is a variable for datetime that has nothing to do with accentuation (I believe);
- Accent error only appears when I write to a file. txt;

Answer 1

When you open a Python file for writing using built-in open:

with open("arquivo.txt", mode="w") as f:
    f.write("blá")

He assumes that this file is in the system’s default encoding (in Python 2, it assumes that the file is latin-1, which is bad). Or at least that’s what the documentation says, because its error suggests that the stream is rejecting characters above 0x7F, so that the encoding used seems to be ASCII.

Python 3 has a some different methods of handling character encodings, but the most recommended way to work with text files when you have full control of them is to provide explicit coding. Then the writing should occur smoothly:

with open("arquivo.txt", mode="w", encoding="utf-8") as f:
    f.write("blá")

For reference, I will also show how to do it in Python 2:

import codecs
with codecs.open("arquivo.txt", "w", "utf-8") as f:
    f.write(u"blá")

Of course, you can choose another character encoding for your output file if you want (it doesn’t have to be the same as the source file).