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pythonasciipython-2.x

Using non-ASCII characters as variable names in Python 2

The following code returns “Error: Invalid Syntax” when reaching the third line:

# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
print “åäö”
ÅÄÖ = 4

The print statement works fine despite holding non-ASCII characters. The problem seems to be when the non-ASCII characters are used as variable names. Doing this in Python 3 works perfectly fine, and I’ve understood that this is because Python 3 and 2 treat strings differently, but I need to use Python 2 for various reasons.

Being able to write the letters åäö in Python 2.7 would be extremely valuable to me, partly because I am fairly new to programming in Python and strongly prefer naming my variables and functions in Swedish as it makes them much easier to separate from Pythons in-built functions.

Solution

  • You can't do this. The language syntax specification simply doesn't allow it for Python 2.x:

    https://docs.python.org/2/reference/lexical_analysis.html#identifiers

    As you already discovered this was changed for Python 3 where the syntax allows certain kinds of non-ascii characters to occur in identifiers

    https://docs.python.org/3/reference/lexical_analysis.html#identifiers

    (Note that identifiers are something else entirely as string literals!)