Too Long; Didn't Read
There are about <a href="https://github.com/search?l=Python&q=coding&type=Code&utf8=%E2%9C%93" target="_blank">15 million</a> lines of Python code starting with a variant of the form: <code class="markup--code markup--p-code"># -*- coding:<some encoding> -*-</code>hosted on GitHub. To any person learning Python, this might seem as another single-line “comment”. It sure did look that way to me when I started out programming in Python. However, I soon realized that there is something mysterious and esoteric about it. It was some kind of <strong><em>special comment</em></strong> which was being used by every Python developer across codebases. In this article, I will try to break down the concepts behind this line of code.