I got the same with a character that visibly appeared as an asterisk, but was a UTF-8 sequence instead.
Encoder * st;
When compiled returned:
g.c:2:1: error: stray ‘\342’ in program
g.c:2:1: error: stray ‘\210’ in program
g.c:2:1: error: stray ‘\227’ in program
342 210 227 turns out to be UTF-8 for ASTERISK OPERATOR.
Deleting the '*' and typing it again fixed the problem.