Python “SyntaxError: Non-ASCII character ‘\xe2’ in file”

You’ve got a stray byte floating around. You can find it by running

with open("x.py") as fp:
    for i, line in enumerate(fp):
        if "\xe2" in line:
            print i, repr(line)

where you should replace "x.py" by the name of your program. You’ll see the line number and the offending line(s). For example, after inserting that byte arbitrarily, I got:

4 "\xe2        lb = conn.create_load_balancer('my_lb', ['us-east-1a', 'us-east-1b'],[(80, 8080, 'http'), (443, 8443, 'tcp')])\n"