[Swig-user] What is the preferred method of generating UTF-8 python documentation?

[Alan W. I. <ir...@be...>]

I am currently using the following method of including documentation
strings withing the generated python binding for PLplot:

%include swig_documentation.i

(where swig_documentation.i has lots of
%feature( "docstring", ....

commands).

That method works fine for ascii documentation, but as soon
as I attempted to include UTF-8 strings within that documentation
I ran into the following run-time issue with the swig-generated result:

__________________________________
Traceback (most recent call last):
   File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
     File
"/home/software/plplot_svn/HEAD/plplot_allura/bindings/python/plplot.py",
line 21, in <module>
     from plplotc import *
       File
"/home/software/plplot_svn/HEAD/build_dir/bindings/python/plplotc.py",
line 3954
SyntaxError: Non-ASCII character '\xe2' in file
/home/software/plplot_svn/HEAD/build_dir/bindings/python/plplotc.py on
line 3955, but no encoding declared; see
http://www.python.org/peps/pep-0263.html for details
__________________________________

The first two lines of plplotc.py are

# This file was automatically generated by SWIG (http://www.swig.org).
# Version 2.0.7

When I manually appended "coding: utf-8" to that first line (appending
such a string to the first of second line of the file is the standard
method of specifying Python source file encodings according the above
URL), then the above run-time error disappeared, and subsquent
attempts within python to print out the UTF-8 documentation worked
without issues.

So to set this up automatically, I could use a "sed" command to append
the required string to the first line of the swig-generated file, but
that is obviously a hack.  Therefore, is there some more official
automatic method of generating UTF-8 python documentation with swig?

Alan
__________________________
Alan W. Irwin

Astronomical research affiliation with Department of Physics and Astronomy,
University of Victoria (astrowww.phys.uvic.ca).

Programming affiliations with the FreeEOS equation-of-state
implementation for stellar interiors (freeeos.sf.net); the Time
Ephemerides project (timeephem.sf.net); PLplot scientific plotting
software package (plplot.sf.net); the libLASi project
(unifont.org/lasi); the Loads of Linux Links project (loll.sf.net);
and the Linux Brochure Project (lbproject.sf.net).
__________________________

Linux-powered Science
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