Running script outside Spyder yields UnicodeDecodeError

[anatoly techtonik]

When I run script with unicode symbols in Spyder it works ok, but when I attempt to do the same from terminal, a UnicodeDecodeError error is raised. The script includes this header:

# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-'

Spyder shows UTF-8 encoding. Special symbols are written by strings like '╔' not prefixed by u. If all strings should be specified as u'╔' then why it works with Spyder? What could be the reason?