[The appropriate RFC](http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3629) says UTF-8. ``utf8`` is just a bad syntactic sugar for ``utf-8``.

In fact, the correct special comment would be ``# coding: UTF-8`` since the ``-*-`` thing is just an Emacs code standardized in Python.

But because you are using the ``-*-`` and I am using Emacs, I can assure you that Emacs does not recognize without the hyphen. ;-)