python - Define source code encoding on command line, not in source code

Question

I want to contribute to an open source python library which is on 2.7. (https://github.com/plexinc-plugins) Its source code files do not have this coding: utf-8 header comment that everywhere is mentioned and apparently was set in PEP 263. However, I still get an SyntaxError: Non-ASCII character 'xc3' in file […] but no encoding declared; see http://python.org/dev/peps/pep-0263/ for details when I try to $ python them on the command line.

(How) can I set on interpreter level, i.e. with the python command, that the whole code base is UTF-8?

What I tried:

• I've seen environment variables (PYTHONUTF8=1 or PYTHONIOENCODING) that are supposed to do the trick but they don't work, i.e. error stays the same. (aha: seems to be >=3.7, so nevermind)
• A command-line argument -X utf8 says -X is reserved for implementation-specific arguments. (dito 3.7)
• There's also stuff going on with a sitecustomize.py but I don't know what it is. Is it a bootstrap file that is loaded prior to everything else? At least I wasn't able to find it.

question from:https://stackoverflow.com/questions/65869817/define-source-code-encoding-on-command-line-not-in-source-code

Answer 1

Waitting for answers