How to fix error: fatal error: Python.h: No such file or directory

This is a common error when your system don't have the python-dev.

I got this error when I try to use : pip .

Just install the package python-dev and then all will working well.

News - Python 3.4.0 Alpha 2 was released .

From python official website I found this :

Python 3.4.0 alpha 2 was released on September 9th, 2013. This is a preview release of the next major release of Python, Python 3.4, and is not suitable for production environments.

Major new features of the 3.4 series, compared to 3.3

Python 3.4 includes a range of improvements of the 3.x series, including hundreds of small improvements and bug fixes. Major new features and changes in the 3.4 release series so far include:

PEP 435, a standardized "enum" module

PEP 442, improved semantics for object finalization

PEP 443, adding single-dispatch generic functions to the standard library

PEP 445, a new C API for implementing custom memory allocators

PEP 446, changing file descriptors to not be inherited by default in subprocesses...

Working with PEP 8 conventions ...

I am wrote my own python scripts to long time ago and now I saw many of this scripts are a mess  in terms of PEP criteria.
What is the pep criteria? The PEP describing style guidelines for the C code in the C implementation of Python.
If you using Blender 3D/Python development  then you need to follow the PEP 8.
The PEP 8 and can be found here and the authors are: Guido van Rossum , Barry Warsaw and Nick Coghlan.
Today I will show you a brief listing of pep8 criteria:
-indentation of 4 spaces not use tabs
-camel caps for class names: MyClass , AnotherClass
-all lower case underscore separated module names: my_module, another_module
-use explicit imports, not importing '*'
-imports should usually be on separate lines, not import os,sys
-adding whitespace around the operators , not 1+2 or 7+ 3
-don't use spaces around the = sign , not a = b +1
-use single quotes for enums, and double quotes for strings
-each line of a block comment starts with a # and a single space
-don't make comments that contradict the code
-if you want to writing good documentation strings then follow the PEP 257 conventions.
-run checks for pep8 compliance

# <pep8 compliant=""></pep8>

-and enable line length checks use this instead

# <pep8-80 compliant=""></pep8-80>

-don't use multiple statements on the same line, like:

if foo == 'test': do_test_thing()
one_test(); two_test()

... this is the correct way:

if foo == 'test':
    do_test_thing()
one_test()
two_test()

Also you can read about Blender 3D/Python and PEP 8 best practice here.

Fix python error: SyntaxError: Non-ASCII character.

This can be fix easy ... just add the below line at top of the python file:

# coding: utf-8

You will see now something like this error:

SyntaxError: invalid syntax

... but also will be point to the bad encoding character with : ^
For example I had this:

usertest@home:~$ python sunet.py 
  File "sunet.py", line 22
    def  __init__ ( self , a , b , c ) :
                                 ^
SyntaxError: invalid syntax

How to deal with environment variables using python script.

Any OS like Linux, Unix, Windows has environment variables.

Also any variables which must not be committed on a public code can be used in this way.

You can give this variables to your application.

Let's see one simple example about how to do that:

import os
ENV_VAR = os.environ.get("ENV_VAR", None)
if not ENV_VAR:
        print "not ENV_VAR"
if ENV_VAR:
        print "yes ! is ENV_VAR"

Now you can give this ENV_VAR to the script or not. See next...

usertest@home:~$ ENV_VAR=true python demo-env.py 
yes ! is ENV_VAR
usertest@home:~$ python demo-env.py 
not ENV_VAR

With Python 3 on Unix, environment variables are decoded using the file system encoding.