This error indicates that you are writing non-ASCII characters in your code. At compile time, the interpreter gets confused and throws SyntaxError: Non-ASCII character ‘\xe2’ .
ASCII characters use the same encoding as the first 128 characters of UTF-8, so ASCII text is UTF-8 compatible. First, you must understand the difference between ASCII and non-ASCII characters.
What is ASCII code
ASCII is the most popular character encoding format for text data on computers and the Internet (American Standard Code for Information Interchange).
There are 128 additional distinct values for alphanumeric, special, and control characters in ASCII-encoded data.
Error in Python SyntaxError: Non-ASCII character ‘\xe2’
The core reason behind this error is that you are reading characters that are not recognized by the Python compiler.
For example, let's try the symbol £ which is not recognized by the Python interpreter.
string = "£"
fp = open("test.txt", "w+")
fp.write("%s" % string)
print(string)
Output:
SyntaxError: Non-ASCII character '\xe2'
The symbol £ is not recognized by the interpreter, so it gives SyntaxError: Non-ASCII character ‘\xe2’.
How to fix syntax error: non-ASCII character ‘\xe2’ in Python file
Here, we have included the #coding: utf-8 statement at the top of the program. This code will create a file test.txt in which the £ value is stored and will be printed in the output as shown.
Code example:
# coding: utf-8
string = "£"
fp = open("test.txt", "w+")
fp.write("%s" % string)
print(string)
Output:
£
Reading the PEP provided by the error, it says that £ is not an ASCII character, even though your code tries to use it. If possible, use UTF-8 encoding and put # coding: utf-8 at the top of your program to get started.
To get more sophisticated, you can even declare the encoding on a string-by-string basis in your code. However, if you try to add the £ literal to your code, you'll need an encoder that supports it throughout the file.
You can also add the lines of code given below.
#!/usr/bin/env python
# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
Summarize
Non-ASCII is not allowed in Python because the interpreter will treat it as SyntaxError. Python cannot and should not attempt to determine whether a sequence of bytes represents a string outside the ASCII range.
To fix this error we have to add encoding: utf-8 at the top of the program.