SyntaxError: Non-ASCII Character. Python

Could somebody tell me which character is a non-ASCII character in the following: Columns(str) – comma-seperated list of values. Works only if format is tab or xls. For Unitprot

Solution 1:

You are using 'fancy' curly quotes in that line:

>>> u'‘database(PDB)’'
u'\u2018database(PDB)\u2019'

That's a U+2018 LEFT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK at the start and U+2019 RIGHT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK at the end.

Use ASCII quotes (U+0027 APOSTROPHE or U+0022 QUOTATION MARK) or declare an encoding other than ASCII for your source.

You are also using an U+2013 EN DASH:

>>> u'Columns(str) –'
u'Columns(str) \u2013'

Replace that with a U+002D HYPHEN-MINUS.

All three characters encode to UTF-8 with a leading E2 byte:

>>> u'\u2013 \u2018 \u2019'.encode('utf8')
'\xe2\x80\x93 \xe2\x80\x98 \xe2\x80\x99'

which you then see reflected in the SyntaxError exception message.

You may want to avoid using these characters in the first place. It could be that your OS is replacing these as you type, or you are using a word processor instead of a plain text editor to write your code and it is replacing these for you. You probably want to switch that feature off.

Solution 2:

Previously encountered the same problem and same error, python2 will default to using ASCII encoding. You can try to declare the following comment in the py file's first or second line:

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