Why declare unicode by string in python?

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Those are two different things, as others have mentioned.

When you specify # -*- coding: utf-8 -*-, you’re telling Python the source file you’ve saved is utf-8. The default for Python 2 is ASCII (for Python 3 it’s utf-8). This just affects how the interpreter reads the characters in the file.

In general, it’s probably not the best idea to embed high unicode characters into your file no matter what the encoding is; you can use string unicode escapes, which work in either encoding.

When you declare a string with a u in front, like u'This is a string', it tells the Python compiler that the string is Unicode, not bytes. This is handled mostly transparently by the interpreter; the most obvious difference is that you can now embed unicode characters in the string (that is, u'\u2665' is now legal). You can use from __future__ import unicode_literals to make it the default.

This only applies to Python 2; in Python 3 the default is Unicode, and you need to specify a b in front (like b'These are bytes', to declare a sequence of bytes).

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