Python, replace long dash with short dash?

Question

I want to replace a long dash (–) with a short dash (-). My code:

if " – " in string:
      string = string.replace(" – ", " - ")

results in the following error:

SyntaxError: Non-ASCII character '\xe2' in file ./script.py on line 76, but no encoding declared; see http://www.python.org/peps/pep-0263.html for details

How can I fix this?

Answer 1

Long dash is not an ASCII character. Declare encoding of your script, like this (somewhere on top):

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

There are also other encodings beside utf-8 but it is always safe to use utf-8 if not working with ASCII characters which covers virtually all (unicode) characters.

See PEP 0263 for more info.