Documentation

This page of the documentation states that (emphasis mine):

Python looks for coding: name or coding=name in the comment.
If you don’t include such a comment, the default encoding used will be UTF-8 as already mentioned. See also PEP 263 for more information.

However, PEP 263 reports that:

Python will default to ASCII as standard encoding if no other encoding hints are given.

which applies only to Python 2 and is a bit misleading.

I suggest including or even replacing the PEP reference with PEP 3120, which applies to Python 3.0 and later and reads:

This PEP proposes to change the default source encoding from ASCII to UTF-8

Linked PRs

• gh-107583: Update Doc/howto/unicode.rst #109501